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.
Gusto Solo is the all-in-one platform solopreneurs (and their accountants) run their whole business on. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help build the next chapter of Solo. You'll work in a tight, high-leverage funnel where your work maps directly to top-line revenue, and you'll help build an AI-native product.
Responsibilities:
- Own end-to-end delivery of net-new product areas, from technical design through shipping.
- Use AI as a genuine multiplier in your own workflow, and help build AI-native experiences into the product itself (including MCP tools).
- Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and GTM to identify customer and business problems, prototype solutions, and iterate quickly.
- Make pragmatic architecture and data-modeling decisions for problems that mostly don't have existing precedent at Gusto yet.
- Build and maintain full-stack features - from backend APIs to frontend UI - with an eye toward scalability and maintainability as the team and product grow.
- Weigh in beyond the "engineer lane" when it helps the team: product framing, design tradeoffs, or GTM considerations.
- Help define engineering practices and technical foundations for a team that's still early in its build-out.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping full-stack features end to end.
- Proficiency across a full-stack toolkit (e.g., Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, GraphQL) and the judgment to choose the right tool for the problem.
- Demonstrated ownership of 0→1 or greenfield projects, not just extension of existing systems.
- A self-driven mindset: comfortable setting direction amid ambiguity, not just executing against a spec.
- Genuine, habitual use of AI tools in day-to-day engineering work.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with a track record of strong cross-functional partnership.
Nice to Have:
- Experience building for self-employed businesses or SMBs.
- Experience in a regulated or compliance-adjacent domain (fintech, payroll, tax, accounting).
- Experience shipping AI-powered or AI-augmented product experiences (agents, copilots, LLM-based tooling).
- Startup or "team of one" experience, comfortable operating with high autonomy and few guardrails.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco. 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. 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). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale. Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.