Staff Software Engineer, PEO
Gusto
$163,000 - $204,000 / year
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Description
About Gusto
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.
All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.
AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.
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 so owners don't have to assemble it themselves. It's one of the biggest strategic bets in the company. 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. The decisions you make here shape whether a small business can adopt one of the most consequential products we've ever shipped, or give up halfway through.
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. Much of what that journey depends on is built by other teams across Gusto, so our job is to make it feel like one coherent product rather than a series of handoffs. That makes the work as much cross-team design and negotiation as it is code, and it means you'll have real influence over how the experience gets shaped, not just how it's implemented. The team is a pod of engineers, product manager, and designer with a bias towards building and shipping.
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. Ruby on Rails and React/TypeScript are what we use and are desirable, but we care more about depth than the specific stack.
- 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.
- [Bonus] 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.
At Gusto, we don't use titles the traditional way, as a signal of rank or hierarchy. Instead, our titles describe two things at once — your craft (what you do, e.g. Engineering, Design) and your scope of ownership (what you're accountable for) — which is why you'll see something like "Head of X" instead of a rank word like "Director" that tells you neither. Because of this, the title on this posting may look different from what you'd expect based on the scope and seniority of the role, and from how similar roles are typically titled elsewhere. If you have questions about how this role compares to your current title or level, your recruiter can help translate.
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.
Reliable, consistent presence: We expect regular and predictable attendance, whether you're working in-office, hybrid, or fully remote, so that you stay closely connected to your team, customers, and stakeholders in real time and ensure colleagues and customers receive the timely support and responsiveness they deserve.
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.
Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.
Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.
Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.
Benefits
- health insurance
- 401(k)
- stock options
About this role
Gusto is building out its PEO product—a major strategic initiative where the company becomes a co-employer for small businesses—and they're looking for a Staff Engineer to own the entire customer journey from discovery through full setup. This is a high-leverage role where your technical decisions directly determine whether businesses successfully adopt the product or drop out partway through. You'll be accountable end-to-end for the onboarding experience, which means the work spans both deep technical execution and significant cross-team coordination to stitch together a seamless product from multiple internal systems.
The day-to-day involves setting technical direction in a regulated domain where accuracy matters, building in Ruby on Rails and React/TypeScript, instrumenting the funnel to drive decisions from data rather than intuition, and raising the bar on testing and observability as the product scales. You'll also embed AI into both how you work and into the customer experience itself. This is as much about design and negotiation across team boundaries as it is about coding—you'll need to influence how the experience gets shaped, not just implement it.
You should have 8+ years of full-stack experience with a track record of owning customer-facing surfaces in large production systems, demonstrated fluency with AI tools, and a strong ability to move in ambiguity while anticipating what comes next. Growth experience—funnels, conversion, provisioning—is a bonus. The role is hybrid based in Missouri with the option to work from Gusto's Denver, San Francisco, or New York offices on designated days. Compensation ranges from $163,000–$204,000 depending on location and experience, plus equity.
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Pay for this role
$163,000 to $204,000 per year
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