Staff Software Engineer, Local Environments Team
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 - Local Environments team, you will be a key player in defining, maintaining and enhancing the local development experience for our software engineering team. You will be responsible for ensuring environments are consistently working, troubleshooting issues, streamlining initial setups, and driving improvements to our tooling and processes. Crucially, you will also be exploring and implementing innovative ways to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further optimize our development environments and accelerate local development. 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 automation.
About the Team:
The Local Environments team, part of the Developer Productivity organization, is responsible for empowering our software engineers through consistent, reliable, and delightful local development experiences that maximizes engineering velocity and minimizes friction to shipping. We understand that a well-functioning local environment is crucial for productivity, innovation, and overall developer happiness. We proactively work to ensure environments are stable, easy to set up, and continuously improved, allowing our engineers to focus on building amazing software.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Identify opportunities for improvement and drive initiatives to enhance the efficiency and reliability of development environments with a focus on building faster developer feedback loops leveraging emerging AI technologies balanced with established practices and tool chains.
- Contribute to the development and improvement of internal platforms and tools related to development environments.
- Work closely with software engineers to understand their pain points and requirements related to local development.
- Collaborate with other infrastructure and platform teams to ensure seamless integration of development environments with other systems.
- Proactively monitor and maintain the health and stability of standard development environments.
- Diagnose and resolve issues related to local setups, including operating system configurations, networking, dependencies, and tooling.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of software development experience
- Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment — integrating intelligence, automation, and experimentation to increase developer productivity through tooling and infrastructure enhancements.
- Systems thinker with a strong ability to communicate effectively.
- Comfortable with architectural thinking and delivering solutions through code.
- Experience with Rails and Ruby, including developer tooling for large engineering teams.
- Ability to work with colleagues as both customers and partners.
- Active working knowledge and architecture experience with Ruby.
- Experience with asynchronous processing using Sidekiq and/or Kafka.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $190,000/yr to $210,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $220,000/yr to $250,000/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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