Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Engineer seat sits at a classic SaaS intersection: product engineering that directly enables monetizable workflows, in this case business finance and accounting capabilities delivered as software. The scope spans both net new product work and platform scaling, which is often where SaaS companies differentiate through reliability, integration depth, and end to end user experience rather than isolated features.
From a SaaS career standpoint, the role offers durable leverage because it touches the full product lifecycle and the operational realities that come with customer facing financial tooling. Experience here tends to translate across subscription businesses that run on multi service architectures, strict correctness expectations, and cross functional decision making with Product, Design, Data, and Compliance. The explicit emphasis on applying AI tooling also signals exposure to modern development practices that many SaaS engineering orgs are standardising around.
This role is best suited to an engineer who enjoys ambiguity, prefers leading multi quarter initiatives, and is comfortable making architecture and tradeoff calls that will be revisited as products mature. It also fits someone motivated by building foundational systems that other teams and products depend on, where success is measured in resilience, clarity, and adoption rather than isolated delivery.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Role:
As a Staff Engineer, you’ll play a significant role in building new products and scaling existing ones to further evolve Gusto’s product offerings. Your work will focus on improving our customers’ financial tools, helping them spend less time managing their finances and more time focusing on their businesses. You will collaborate with a team of highly skilled professionals, contributing engineering expertise throughout the product development lifecycle—from ideation and design to architecture, development, release, and post-release monitoring and scaling.
About the Team:
At Gusto, the Business Money team is on a mission to support small and medium-sized businesses by providing financial tools that help them manage cash flow and run their businesses with confidence. The suite of products we own includes (but is not limited to) Bill Pay, Invoicing, Expenses, Payroll Bridge (Payroll Line of Credit to fund payroll), and a Cash Flow Dashboard that offers a comprehensive view of business finances.
Our team is relatively small but operates at a fast, startup-like pace. In less than two years, the team has effectively created a new business vertical called Gusto Money, delivering multiple large scale 0-1 products that help small businesses have more control over their business finances and greater confidence in making financial decisions. As we continue to expand our offerings across business finance, accounting, and cash flow management, this is a great opportunity to apply your skills and help shape the future of Gusto Money.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Build products & services and scale the platform that powers business money and accounting experiences at Gusto
- Take ownership of projects, ensuring they meet high standards of quality and performance
- Adopt the latest best practices for using AI technologies across all aspects of product development
- Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
- Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
- Help drive the product development process from concept to launch
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 8+ years of professional software development experience
- Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale and resilient distributed systems and/or software platforms
- Maximizes the use of AI tooling while guiding the team in adopting modern AI practices
- Comfortable dealing with ambiguity and working with quick iteration cycles
- Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
- Willingness to collaborate across different functions
- An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
- Experience as a technical lead, leading the work of multiple engineers on multi-quarter projects
Nice, but not required:
- Experience in the Fintech industry building scalable backend systems to power financial services and products
- Experience with accounting, bookkeeping, tax, or financial reporting systems and a strong understanding of accounting workflows
- Familiarity with small business accounting or tax domains, including concepts such as ledgers, reconciliations, financial statements, payroll accounting, or tax compliance
- Ruby/Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, React, Typescript, AWS
Please note that a two day travel to a Gusto office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
