About the Role:
Gusto Solo is the all-in-one platform solopreneurs (and their accountants) run their whole business on. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help build the next chapter of Solo. You'll work in a tight, high-leverage funnel where your work maps directly to top-line revenue, and you'll help build an AI-native product.
We're looking for an owner, not just an executor: someone with a strong product mindset who spots the problem, drives the change, and sees it through end to end. We're a small, scrappy, fast-moving team, so we're looking for someone who likes wearing many hats. If you want to weigh in on product, design, or GTM along the way, there's real room for that here.
About the Team:
Self-employed businesses are one of the fastest-growing segments of small business, and Gusto is betting on making Solo the true all-in-one platform for solopreneurs. This is a fully funded, high-performing team: a small group of engineers and an Engineering Manager, plus a dedicated Data Scientist, Designer, and GTM partner with room to grow based on roadmap progress.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Own end-to-end delivery of net-new product areas, from technical design through shipping.
- Use AI as a genuine multiplier in your own workflow, and help build AI-native experiences into the product itself (including MCP tools).
- Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and GTM to identify customer and business problems, prototype solutions, and iterate quickly.
- Make pragmatic architecture and data-modeling decisions for problems that mostly don't have existing precedent at Gusto yet.
- Build and maintain full-stack features - from backend APIs to frontend UI - with an eye toward scalability and maintainability as the team and product grow.
- Weigh in beyond the "engineer lane" when it helps the team: product framing, design tradeoffs, or GTM considerations.
- Help define engineering practices and technical foundations for a team that's still early in its build-out.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping full-stack features end to end.
- Proficiency across a full-stack toolkit (e.g., Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, GraphQL) and the judgment to choose the right tool for the problem.
- Demonstrated ownership of 0→1 or greenfield projects, not just extension of existing systems.
- A self-driven mindset: comfortable setting direction amid ambiguity, not just executing against a spec.
- Genuine, habitual use of AI tools in day-to-day engineering work
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with a track record of strong cross-functional partnership.
Bonus points:
- Experience building for self-employed businesses or SMBs.
- Experience in a regulated or compliance-adjacent domain (fintech, payroll, tax, accounting).
- Experience shipping AI-powered or AI-augmented product experiences (agents, copilots, LLM-based tooling).
- Startup or "team of one" experience, comfortable operating with high autonomy and few guardrails.
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 $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco. 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.
