Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Payroll , Developer Experience
$190k - $220k USD
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 focused on Developer Experience on the Embedded Payroll team, you'll be a key technical contributor improving how developers build on top of Gusto's payroll platform. You'll operate at the intersection of platform engineering, API design, and developer experience working hands-on in our codebase while contributing to the direction of tooling, interfaces, and workflows that make it easier for internal teams and external partners to build reliably and efficiently. This role requires strong technical judgment, empathy for developers and solution architects, and the ability to translate friction into scalable platform improvements.
About the Team:
Gusto Embedded Payroll is a platform that allows developers to embed payroll directly into their own software using our APIs. We've taken Gusto’s robust payroll infrastructure and made it available to third-party developers. Our vision is to enable anyone to build the best payroll product for their end customers - powering payroll for small and medium businesses across a variety of industries, from vertical SaaS to fintech and neobanks.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Identify high-leverage opportunities to improve developer experience across our APIs, tooling, documentation, and workflows
- Partner closely with internal product, solution architect, and engineering teams to define solutions for reducing friction when integrating with Embedded Payroll
- Engage directly with external developers to understand pain points, validate solutions, and contribute to platform direction
- Design and evolve APIs, abstractions, and interfaces with a focus on clarity, consistency, and long-term maintainability
- Build and maintain developer-facing tools, libraries, and internal frameworks that improve velocity and reliability
- Lead by example through hands-on development, shipping clean, tested, and well-designed code
- Set and promote best practices for reliability, observability, and backwards compatibility in developer-facing systems
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 8+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated technical leadership within your team and organization. You have a track record of improving developer productivity and platform capabilities.
- Strong backend engineering expertise, with deep experience working in large, production systems (Ruby on Rails experience is a plus). You're comfortable working across multiple layers of abstraction and making pragmatic tradeoffs.
- You've designed APIs, platforms, or tools with developers as your primary customer. You care deeply about usability, documentation, error handling, and the end-to-end experience of building on a platform.
- You've spent time mentoring engineers on your team and within the Embedded Payroll organization, raising the technical bar through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing. Engineers on your team and in your group look to you for guidance on how to tackle ambiguous problems.
- You think in terms of business priorities and know how to orient your team around the right technical goals for the business as well as how to convey technical constraints and needs to business leaders.
- Experience applying AI tools (LLMs, Cursor, Copilot, Agents) to accelerate development, improve code quality, and deliver scalable developer-facing systems. Familiar with how AI tools can improve developer productivity and willing to mentor others on effective AI usage.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $190,000-$220,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $220,000-$260,000 /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.
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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