Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Software Engineer role sits in a core SaaS workflow: annual benefits renewals, where product reliability and clarity directly affect customer retention and compliance outcomes. The remit spans full stack delivery across a mature web application, suggesting work that blends product experience, platform constraints, and domain complexity typical of established SaaS systems that serve large customer bases.
For a long-term SaaS engineering trajectory, the role offers durable leverage points: shaping end to end features, building and evolving APIs that support repeatable business processes, and iterating after launch based on real usage. Exposure to experimentation practices and AI-assisted development also maps to common expectations in modern SaaS orgs, where teams are asked to validate changes and improve delivery efficiency without sacrificing quality. The combination of cross-functional influence and multi-quarter ownership is especially transferable across product-led SaaS environments.
This position is best suited to an engineer who prefers broad accountability over narrow ticket execution, and who is comfortable navigating ambiguity from early specs through operational follow-through. It will fit someone motivated by complex domains, interested in mentoring as part of technical leadership, and oriented toward maintaining and evolving large-scale Rails and React systems.
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 a full-stack software engineer to join the Benefits Renewals team! Each year, customers need to review and update their benefits. This team powers the workflows that guide employers and employees through the renewal process, helping them stay compliant and retain the coverage that works best for them.
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 power the livelihoods of millions using Gusto products — join us!
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and test products in Benefits. Improve the user experience when renewing benefits, for both our external and internal customers. Automate the complex manual processes in health insurance to reduce errors and save time.
- 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 daily
- Build products that our customers genuinely love
Here’s what we’re looking for:
- Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience
- 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
- Experience with implementing A/B tests or experimentation.
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities
- Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
- 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 amount for this role is targeted at $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.
