# Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

**Company**: Gusto
**Location**: Denver, CO;San Francisco, CA;New York, NY;Los Angeles, CA;Seattle, WA
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: staff
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $200,000-$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gusto/jobs/7413644?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_e6a142ea-f99

## Description

### About Gusto

Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy. They handle 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, they support over 400,000 small businesses nationwide.

### About the Role:

We're looking for an experienced engineer with deep expertise in distributed data systems to shape the future of Gusto's storage layer. You'll manage complex migrations, architect high-scale systems, and set standards for automation, resiliency, and security. This is a high-impact role where you'll implement distributed database solutions that enable Gusto's continued growth and scale.

### About the Team:

The Datastores Infrastructure Engineering team designs, builds, and operates data platforms that power Gusto's product: MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, and S3. They ensure infrastructure is consistent, reliable, and ready to support Gusto's growing needs. As they transition to self-hosted distributed databases, the team focuses on reducing blast radius, improving operational resilience, and enabling sustainable scale.

### Responsibilities:

- Architect, deploy, and own the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence

- Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding to isolate Product Services

- Define and drive efficiency improvements across storage infrastructure through query optimization, caching strategies, and workload management

- Define standards and build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems

- Continuously improve operational excellence by reducing on-call burden through sustainable, long-term solutions

- Partner with product engineering teams and technical collaborators to enable rapid and reliable product development

- Mentor engineers across the Datastores Infrastructure team on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems

### Requirements:

- 12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems

- Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (strongly preferred: TiDB; alternatively: CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus, or similar solutions)

- Deep expertise in distributed data systems including horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management

- Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale

- 5+ years of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, caching systems (Redis/ValKey), streaming platforms (Kafka), and infrastructure optimization at scale

- Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams

- Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations

### Nice to Have:

- Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures

- Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale

### Compensation:

The 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.

### Work Environment:

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).

## Skills

### Required
- distributed data systems
- Kubernetes
- TiDB
- database migration
- AWS
- RDS
- Aurora
- Redis
- Kafka
- infrastructure optimization

### Nice to have
- service extraction
- vertical sharding
- Ruby on Rails

---

Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/gusto/jobs/7413644?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)