Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role stands out in SaaS because it sits at the point where a mature payroll platform is being extended into a new geography. Building core Canadian payroll capabilities from the ground up brings the kind of product-domain engineering that many SaaS companies only encounter when entering regulated markets, where correctness and auditability are as important as feature delivery.
For a long-term SaaS engineering career, the work offers durable experience in designing backend services that encode business logic, exposing that logic through APIs, and evolving systems as real customer usage and operational constraints emerge. The cross-functional nature of payroll, spanning product, compliance, operations, and platform concerns, mirrors how complex SaaS products scale beyond pure software into repeatable processes and reliable workflows. The emphasis on architecture documentation and incremental improvement in a large codebase also maps well to staff-level expectations across SaaS.
This role is best suited to an engineer who prefers owning a domain end to end, enjoys translating ambiguous requirements into dependable systems, and is comfortable pairing deep backend work with occasional full-stack touchpoints. It will particularly fit someone motivated by regulated problem spaces and by setting technical direction while partnering closely with non-engineering stakeholders.
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:
We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gusto's Payroll Canada team, where you'll help build and scale the payroll experience for Canadian businesses. This is a 0-to-1 opportunity, meaning you'll be building core payroll capabilities for a new market largely from scratch, not just extending an established product. This is primarily a backend role which involves designing and evolving the services and business logic that power Canadian payroll with full-stack components where that logic surfaces to customers via GraphQL. You'll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with Product and Platform teams, and help bring Gusto's payroll product to a new country.
About the Team:
The Payroll Canada team is building Gusto's payroll product for the Canadian market, from internal (Gusto-on-Gusto) payroll to external customers running payroll for their own employees. We own the backend services and business logic that handle Canadian payroll calculations, compliance, and remittances, and we connect that logic to the frontend through GraphQL. Our work sits at the intersection of backend product engineering and a new, fast-moving market launch, in a highly regulated domain.
Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and maintain backend services and business logic that power Canadian payroll — calculations, compliance, remittances, and related workflows - on Gusto’s Ruby on Rails platform
- Connect backend logic to the frontend through well-designed GraphQL APIs, partnering with frontend engineers on the full user experience
- Own a primary domain within Payroll Canada, taking responsibility for correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution as the product and customer base grow
- Act as a technical partner across Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver accurate, compliant, and customer-impacting solutions
- Author and drive architecture and design documents, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals as we expand in Canada
- Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and testing, and help normalize and spread effective AI usage across the team
Here's what we're looking for:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
- Comfortable venturing into full-stack work when needed, even if your primary strength is backend
- Experience applying AI tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate development, improve code quality and build testing. Comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible AI-assisted development workflows.
- Experience working in large, complex codebases and a demonstrated ability to improve them incrementally without breaking things. Designing, building, and testing production level code that functions at scale.
- Strong systems thinking and design skills, able to build mental models of unfamiliar systems, ask the right questions, and produce clear analysis others can act on, while designing for performance, scalability, and reliability in production.
- Experience collaborating across teams as a technical partner, communicating technical complexity clearly to product and design partners and helping the team navigate tradeoffs with full context
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
- Interest in or experience with payroll, tax, or compliance domains a plus
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.
