Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits at a classic SaaS intersection of product experience and operational risk: delivering HR guidance and documentation inside a platform where accuracy is non negotiable. The remit spans both employer and employee workflows, which is a common pattern in mature SaaS products that serve multiple personas in the same system. The additional focus on AI assisted tooling for HR Partners reflects a broader SaaS shift toward embedding automation into service delivery, not only into end user features.
For a long term SaaS engineering path, the role offers exposure to end to end product development with clear accountability after launch, a useful proving ground for senior technical leadership. Working in a compliance heavy domain builds durable instincts around correctness, auditability, and edge case handling, all transferable to other regulated SaaS areas. The mention of scaling a large Rails and React codebase also signals practice in evolving established systems without stalling product iteration.
This position tends to suit engineers who like shaping ambiguous problems into shippable software, and who are comfortable influencing direction across functions rather than staying within a narrow execution lane. It also aligns with those interested in applying AI pragmatically, especially where safety and reliability matter as much as speed.
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
We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join Gusto's HR Experience team.
Half the American workforce works at a small business, and most of those businesses can't afford a real HR team. When they hit an HR decision they don't have the expertise for — a termination, a comp change, setting a time-off policy for the first time — they either pay for expensive outside help or guess, even though the right answer depends on rules that vary across 50 states and hundreds of localities. HR Experience is building that expertise directly into Gusto: compliant HR guidance and documentation, built natively for both the employer creating it and the employee receiving it, in a domain where the compliance bar is real — "mostly right" isn't good enough.
You'll also help drive the other half of HR Experience's mission: using AI to make Gusto's human HR Partners faster and more effective, so more small businesses can get real HR support without needing to hire their own HR team.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through to launch and long-term iteration. That means writing clean frontend code, designing and building reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and taking ownership of what happens after a feature ships.
If you're drawn to work that combines technical craft with real-world impact — helping small businesses get HR infrastructure they can actually rely on — join us!
Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and test across Gusto's HR experience — the employer-facing document and guidance tools, and the employee-facing side of that same experience
- Build AI tools and agents that help scale Gusto's HR Partners team, automating the compliance and document workflows human HR partners handle today
- Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
- Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
- Collaborate with our Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch
- Build products that our customers genuinely love
Here's what we're looking for:
- Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
- Compliance/HR Domain Expertise (Preferred): experience building products in regulated, compliance-heavy domains (HR, payroll, benefits, tax, or similar), especially where requirements vary by state or locality
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale
- Experience driving large, cross-functional projects end-to-end through ambiguity — scoping, sequencing, and unblocking without needing the problem pre-broken-down; aligning multiple stakeholders and working with multiple teams
- Actively uses agentic coding tools (for example, Claude Code or Codex) as part of your daily engineering workflow, and has used them to meaningfully accelerate yourself and others
- Experience with, or strong interest in, building agents and MCP tools — and judgment about applying them safely in domains where "mostly right" isn't good enough
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
Others:
- Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails
- Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment
- Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
- Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders
Please note that travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.
Our cash compensation range for this role is $199,000–$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.
