Staff Software Engineer, HR Experience

Job Overview

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

Responsibilities

• Owns full-stack features independently, from technical design through implementation, testing, and production monitoring, with light oversight.
• Design, build, and maintain features for the HRX Engineering (HR Experience) product surface.
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code across the stack.
• Participate in code review, sprint planning, and retros.
• Partner with product and design to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Help monitor and improve the reliability, performance, and quality of shipped features.
• Participate in on-call rotation and lead incident response for owned systems.
• Provide technical guidance and code-review mentorship to less-tenured engineers.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including full-stack work.
• Demonstrated ability to design, build, and ship features spanning frontend, backend, and data layer with minimal oversight.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern backend language/framework (e.g., Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Python/Django) and one modern frontend framework (e.g., React, TypeScript).
• Solid understanding of relational databases , schema design, migrations, and query performance.
• Comfortable owning a project end-to-end: scoping, technical design, implementation, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Strong grounding in software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, automated testing, CI/CD.
• Experience partnering cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and other engineers.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including technical design docs.

Nice to Have

• Experience in HR tech, payroll, or fintech domains.
• Experience designing REST or GraphQL APIs.
• Exposure to accessibility (a11y) best practices.

Compensation and Benefits

• Cash compensation targeted at $197,000–$247,000 for New York.
• Competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) for full-time employees.
• Physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City with hybrid work arrangements.