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. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.
We're looking for a staff software engineer to join Tax Accounts , the team whose job is to make the complexity of dealing with hundreds of tax agencies disappear. As a Staff Software Engineer on Tax Accounts, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: clean frontend code, reliable backend APIs and data models against a genuinely complex compliance domain, and the automation that keeps hundreds of thousands of accounts in sync with the agencies behind them.
Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and test the systems behind employer and employee tax accounts: agency registrations, power-of-attorney / third-party authorizations, tax notices, agency filings, and state/federal/employee tax setup across jurisdictions
- Build automation that requests and maintains access with tax agencies on the customer's behalf , the bots, data exchanges, and agency-event pipelines that keep accounts, rates, and deposit schedules accurate and prevent failed filings
- Model complex, jurisdiction-specific compliance rules into maintainable systems, and own reliability, performance, and correctness in a domain where accuracy is non-negotiable
- Partner closely with Product, Design, Tax Operations, and PEO teams to turn customer and compliance pain into solutions , then prototype, iterate, and launch
- Mentor other engineers and help the team solve some of the hardest problems in a very complex domain, at large scale
- Build products that our customers genuinely love
Here's what we're looking for:
- Significant software-development experience, typically 8+ years, with demonstrated staff-level technical leadership
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale
- Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain, and a strong sense of ownership over reliability, performance, and correctness
- Comfort designing data models and APIs for a complex, rules-heavy domain (compliance, tax, payments, or similar) where edge cases and correctness matter
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new capabilities , plus curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, and a habit of sharing best practices to scale AI use safely across the team
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
- Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders
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.