# Staff Software Engineer, Security & AI Platform

**Company**: Gusto
**Location**: San Francisco, CA
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: Targeted at $218,940-260,000
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gusto/jobs/7590298?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_3e77462b-416

## Description

About Gusto At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff , payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR , so owners can focus on their craft and their customers.

About the Role We’re hiring two Staff Engineers for our Product & AI Security Engineering team. You’ll own and evolve the security foundations behind Gusto’s products and AI/LLM experiences,from authentication and authorization at scale to securing core services and data.

Responsibilities

- Design, build, and operate authentication and authorization systems that work at Gusto scale.

- Strengthen core services and data protections, including access control, storage, and APIs.

- Detect and mitigate account takeover and other abuse, improving safety for our customers.

- Build security platforms and tooling that help product and AI teams move quickly and safely.

- Own and improve high-availability security and identity services that other teams depend on.

- Tackle ambiguous AI/LLM security problems from threat modeling to practical mitigations.

- Provide leadership in promoting security and software engineering excellence.

Requirements

- 10+ years of experience as a backend engineer, building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs

- Proven track record building secure, highly available distributed systems and services.

- Hands-on experience with modern security tooling and practices (e.g., SAST, DAST, SIEM, SCA).

- Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript

- Experience with AI tools for coding (ex: Cloud Code, Cursor, Github Copilot)

- Strong collaboration skills and comfort breaking down complex, cross-cutting security and AI problems into clear, practical solutions.

Nice to Have

- Experience with authorization platforms/policy engines (e.g., Open Policy Agent, SpiceDB) and technologies like GraphQL, gRPC, Kubernetes, Terraform, Traefik, Flask, Okta.

- Experience with authentication and authorization, such as SAML/SSO, RBAC, and ABAC.

- Familiarity with security concepts like access control, abuse detection, or data protection

- Prior work on security tooling or platforms

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $218,940-260,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stock equity is additional.

## Skills

### Required
- backend engineer
- large-scale server-side services and APIs
- modern security tooling and practices
- Ruby
- Python
- Kotlin
- JavaScript/TypeScript
- AI tools for coding
- Cloud Code
- Cursor
- Github Copilot
- strong collaboration skills

### Nice to have
- authorization platforms/policy engines
- GraphQL
- gRPC
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Traefik
- Flask
- Okta
- authentication and authorization
- SAML/SSO
- RBAC
- ABAC
- security concepts
- access control
- abuse detection
- data protection

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Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gusto/jobs/7590298?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)