Description
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
Gusto is building a PEO (Professional Employer Organization): a product where Gusto becomes a co-employer for small businesses, taking on payroll, benefits, workers' compensation, and HR compliance.
As a Staff Engineer on PEO Growth, you'll own the path from how a business discovers PEO all the way to getting the business fully set up.
About the Team
PEO Growth owns the customer experience of adopting the PEO , the end-to-end journey that takes a business from interested to fully up and running.
Here's what you'll do day-to-day
- Own the PEO Onboarding experience end to end , how a business learns about the PEO, commits to it, and gets set up on it , and be accountable for whether customers make it all the way through.
- Set technical direction: turn ambiguous product bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions that hold up as the product and its audience grow.
- Build in a regulated domain where quality and accuracy is critical.
- Partner across other app teams to integrate their domains into one coherent journey, and negotiate the seams when ownership is unclear.
- Use AI as a normal part of how you work , coding agents, review, debugging, and codebase exploration , and help build AI-assisted guidance into the onboarding experience itself so customers get unstuck without waiting on a human.
- Instrument the funnel and make decisions from it: define what "onboarding is working" means, measure it, and use experiments rather than intuition to decide what to change.
- Raise the engineering bar in a fast-moving area , reviews, testing strategy, observability, and the judgment calls about where to build carefully and where to move fast.
Here's what we're looking for
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time owning customer-facing product surfaces in a large production codebase.
- Strong full-stack range: comfortable in a mature server-side codebase and in a modern component-based frontend.
- Demonstrated AI fluency: you already use AI tooling in your day-to-day engineering work, can speak concretely about where it helps and where it doesn't, and you keep up as the tooling changes.
- High ownership in ambiguity. You can take a fuzzy business need, shape it into something buildable, and ship it without waiting for a perfect spec , and you anticipate what the team will need next instead of reacting to it.
- A strong collaborator and influencer across team boundaries, with a track record of leveling up the engineers around you.
- Experience in growth , funnels, conversion, plan and product configuration, or the systems that turn a purchase decision into a provisioned customer.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for 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.