Senior Staff Software Engineer- Platform

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

Senior Staff Software Engineer - Platform

We are looking for a talented Engineering Lead with experience in building and managing secure authentication and authorization systems. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining scalable authorization management systems, ensuring the security of user data, and enabling seamless user experiences. You will collaborate closely with product, security, and engineering teams to integrate robust authorization mechanisms into our platform

Here’s what you’ll do day to day:

• Platform Engineering: Design and implement scalable and reliable platform solutions to support Gusto’s product suite. This includes engineering robust backend systems that scale efficiently, integrating technologies like GraphQL, Sidekiq, and Kafka to optimize data handling, background job processing, and event-driven workflows.
• Operational Excellence: Drive operational excellence by ensuring that the platform is highly available, reliable, and performs well in production environments. Focus on building automated monitoring, incident response, and performance optimization processes to ensure systems run smoothly.
• Hands-on Coding & Development: Contribute directly to the codebase, primarily using Ruby on Rails and GraphQL, ensuring high-quality, maintainable code while supporting the performance and reliability of Gusto’s platform.
• Code Quality & Reviews: Actively participate in code reviews, providing clear and constructive feedback to maintain high engineering standards, and ensuring the team’s code quality continues to improve over time.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate closely with Product Management, Design, Security and Business teams to identify platform requirements, develop innovative solutions, and ensure seamless integration with other product components.
• Platform Performance & Scalability: Focus on optimizing platform performance, working on improving load balancing, caching strategies, and database performance to ensure the platform can scale with increasing traffic and customer demands.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Mentor junior engineers, helping them solve technical challenges, pair programming as needed and growing careers of team members. Take the lead on complex projects, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery of platform solutions.
• Rapid Prototyping & Feature Launches: Prototype, iterate, and deploy new platform features quickly, contributing to an agile development process that brings value to customers faster.
• Foster a Collaborative Environment: Build a collaborative team culture that encourages creativity and innovation, ensuring a positive environment that enables engineers to thrive.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Experience: 12+ years of software development experience, with a strong focus on platform engineering and expertise in Ruby on Rails.
• Technical Expertise: Solid understanding of platform engineering, including system design, performance optimization, and scaling backend systems. Strong experience in backend technologies and tools, especially Ruby on Rails.
• Operational Excellence: Experience in building and maintaining highly available and reliable systems, with a focus on operational excellence. This includes automated monitoring, incident response, performance optimization, and ensuring system health in production environments.
• API Design & Integration: Experience in designing and integrating APIs, ensuring smooth communication between different components of a platform while maintaining system integrity and performance.
• Tools & Frameworks: Familiarity with tools and frameworks commonly used in platform engineering, such as Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and other technologies that help scale modern systems.
• Leadership: Proven experience leading platform engineering efforts, driving the development of large, complex systems, and managing projects end-to-end.
• Data Modeling: Advanced experience with data modeling, building and maintaining relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), and designing systems that are maintainable and easily extensible.
• Problem-Solving: Ability to address complex technical challenges related to platform engineering, including optimizing system performance, ensuring reliability, and scaling systems to handle large traffic.
• Customer Focus: A passion for building solutions that meet customer needs and deliver memorable experiences.
• Effective Communication: Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and collaborate effectively across teams.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $191,000-$214,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and  $225,000-$252,000 San Francisco & New York. 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.

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.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.