Staff Software Engineer, Build Stability
About Gusto
At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.
About the Role:
As a Staff Software Engineer on the Developer Productivity - Build Stability, you will be instrumental in shaping the developer experience for hundreds of engineers at Gusto. You will be part of the team that owns the broader CI ecosystem, focused on improving its performance, scalability, and reliability. Your work will directly impact how quickly we can deliver value to our customers by making our development and deployment pipelines faster and more efficient. This is a high-impact role for an engineer who is passionate about developer tooling and infrastructure. Crucially, you will also be exploring and implementing innovative ways to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further optimize our CI and related systems. You will collaborate closely with engineers across various teams to understand their needs and provide effective solutions, with a forward-thinking approach towards incorporating intelligent solutions.
About the Team:
The Build Stability team, part of the Developer Productivity organization, is at the heart of this mission, owning the Continuous Integration (CI) system that powers our development lifecycle. We are responsible for empowering our software engineers through consistent, reliable, and delightful build systems that maximizes engineering velocity and minimizes friction to shipping.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- You will manage, maintain, and evolve our core CI system, primarily centered around Buildkite, ensuring it can handle our growing engineering organization's needs.
- Champion AI-native patterns within the build and CI domain to increase developer efficiency and velocity.
- Dive deep into our build and test pipelines to identify bottlenecks. You'll implement solutions to drastically reduce build times and improve resource utilization.
- Design, implement, and maintain critical developer workflow tools like merge queues to ensure our main branch is always stable and developers can integrate their code reliably and efficiently.
- Own and enhance our systems for automatically detecting, quarantining, and reporting on flaky tests. Your work here will directly improve the reliability of our test suites and boost developer confidence in our CI system.
- Build robust tools and services that enhance developer workflows, improve observability into our build system, and automate manual processes.
- Partner with product engineering teams to understand their needs, provide support, and champion best practices for building and testing their services effectively.
- Proactively monitor the health of our CI platform, troubleshoot complex issues, and implement measures to prevent future failures, ensuring a stable foundation for all of Gusto's developers.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of software development experience
- Systems thinker with a strong ability to communicate effectively.
- Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment — integrating intelligence, automation, and experimentation to increase developer productivity through tooling and infrastructure enhancements.
- Comfortable with architectural thinking and delivering solutions through code.
- Experience with developer tooling for large engineering teams.
- Ability to work with colleagues as both customers and partners.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $175,000/yr to $195,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $210,000/yr to $235,000/yr in New York, Seattle & San Francisco Bay Area. 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.
Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.
Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.
When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.
Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.
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