Gusto
Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Platform
$163K–$247K
San Francisco, CA - Hybrid · Staff · Full-time · Posted Jan 13, 2026
- Experience
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
About the job
Build and evolve backend payroll infrastructure, APIs, and services used by internal product teams and external partners, with ownership of reliability, scalability, and technical direction.
What you'll do
- Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs for core payroll workflows; own a platform domain’s health and evolution.
- Partner with engineering and cross-functional teams to shape platform solutions and drive architecture and design decisions.
- Improve payroll system performance, reliability, and observability, and use AI-assisted tools to support development and documentation.
What they ask for
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development.
- Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs for multiple product teams.
- Strong system design skills, including production performance optimization, scalability, and reliability.
- Actively use AI-assisted development tools in daily engineering work and be comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage.
Nice to have
- Experience with Ruby (strongly preferred, not required).
Pay
$163,000/yr to $204,000/yr (base salary) in Denver & most remote locations; $197,000/yr to $247,000/yr (base salary) for San Francisco, Seattle & New York
Tools
LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor, Ruby
AI focus
Routinely use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and documentation, and help teams adopt effective, responsible usage.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative