Senior Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Payroll, Developer Experience

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 Senior Staff Staff Software Engineer on the Embedded Payroll team acts as a technical leader shaping how developers build on Gusto’s payroll platform. The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, API design, and developer experience. It combines hands-on work in the codebase with setting direction for tools, interfaces, and workflows used by internal teams and external partners. Success requires strong technical judgment, empathy for developers and solution architects, and the ability to turn 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 a vision for reducing friction when integrating with Embedded Payroll.


• Engage directly with external developers to understand pain points, validate solutions, and influence 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:

• 12+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated ownership of organization-wide engineering initiatives and contributions to scaling engineering organizations.


• Deep backend engineering expertise, including experience operating large, production-grade systems, with comfort working across multiple layers of abstraction and making pragmatic technical tradeoffs.


• Proven experience designing APIs, platforms, or developer tools with developers as the primary customer, with strong attention to usability, documentation, error handling, and end-to-end developer experience.


• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, raise the technical bar across teams, and provide guidance on ambiguous problems and competing priorities.


• Strong business acumen, with the ability to align technical direction to business priorities and clearly communicate constraints, tradeoffs, and needs to non-technical stakeholders.


• Curiosity and effectiveness in leveraging intelligence, automation, and experimentation to design, ship, and operate reliable, partner-facing payroll APIs at scale.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000-$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000 /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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