Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Modern SaaS products increasingly depend on database platforms that can evolve without disrupting customer-facing workflows, and this role sits at that inflection point. The remit spans distributed database adoption on Kubernetes and careful transitions away from monolithic storage patterns, a common challenge for SaaS companies as product surface area and data volume expand. The focus on reliability, consistency, and security reflects the realities of always-on subscription software where infrastructure choices directly shape user trust.
From a SaaS career standpoint, the work builds durable expertise in operating stateful systems at scale, including zero-downtime migration strategy, workload isolation, and performance tuning across mixed data stores. Ownership of automation and operational standards is also a strong signal of platform engineering maturity, offering experience that transfers across SaaS environments running multi-tenant workloads and frequent release cycles. The collaboration with product engineering teams adds practical exposure to aligning storage constraints with application development needs.
This is best suited to senior infrastructure engineers who prefer deep systems work, clear technical ownership, and long-horizon improvements over short-term fixes. It will fit professionals comfortable translating distributed-systems complexity for cross-functional stakeholders and guiding others through operational best practices in production-grade SaaS infrastructure.
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 looking for an experienced engineer with deep expertise in distributed data systems to shape the future of Gusto's storage layer. You'll manage complex migrations, architect high-scale systems, and set standards for automation, resiliency, and security. This is a high-impact role where you'll implement distributed database solutions that enable Gusto's continued growth and scale.
About the Team:
The Datastores Infrastructure Engineering team designs, builds, and operates the data platforms that power Gusto's product: MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and S3. We ensure our infrastructure is consistent, reliable, and ready to support Gusto's growing needs. As we transition to self-hosted distributed databases, the team is focused on reducing blast radius, improving operational resilience, and enabling sustainable scale.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Architect, deploy, and own the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence
- Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding to isolate Product Services
- Define and drive efficiency improvements across the storage infrastructure through query optimization, caching strategies, and workload management
- Define standards and build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems
- Continuously improve operational excellence by reducing on-call burden through sustainable, long-term solutions
- Partner with product engineering teams and technical collaborators to enable rapid and reliable product development
- Mentor engineers across the Datastores Infrastructure team on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems, actively developing our collective operational expertise
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems
- Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (strongly preferred: TiDB; alternatively: CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus, or similar solutions)
- Deep expertise in distributed data systems including horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management
- Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale
- 5+ years of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, caching systems (Redis/ValKey), streaming platforms (Kafka), and infrastructure optimization at scale
- Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
- Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations, driving improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
- Bonus: Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures
- Bonus: Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000-$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
