Senior Software Engineer, Risk

Gusto · San Francisco, CA - Hybrid · Engineering

Posted 2026-08-15

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About the Role:

We're hiring engineers to join our Risk Engineering team, which works on core platform capabilities, improves our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and builds the future of Gusto's Risk system. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll lead well-scoped — and sometimes technically or organizationally complex projects end-to-end: driving technical design, partnering with product, design, and data teams to plan and deliver, and writing the code that powers core experiences. You'll be a domain expert other engineers turn to, and you'll set the technical example for your team. If you're interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team:

In order to enable growth for Gusto and our customers, the Risk org is responsible for defining best-in-class user experiences in order to mitigate financial and reputation risk. This team within our Risk Org is responsible for building the infrastructure for a.) bad actor platform capabilities to prevent fraudsters from abusing Gusto's platform while improving false positive rate and, b.) the credit underwriting and collections platform to enable faster and greater access to credit while minimizing financial loss.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

Design, build, and test infrastructure capabilities that enable the Risk team to efficiently build unique, custom-tailored experiences for existing and emerging Risk products

Lead well-scoped, sometimes complex projects end-to-end  from technical design through rollout partnering with Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, and Operations

Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world

Serve as a domain expert other engineers consult on for Risk platform capabilities

Set expectations with stakeholders on project timelines, communicating updates and changes as the project progresses

Mentor engineers earlier in their careers and contribute to a healthy, high-performing team

Identify and execute on technical debt and quality improvements within your project's domain

Participate in an on-call rotation, respond to reliability, security, and performance incidents, and prioritize postmortem action items

Improve the productivity and happiness of your team with the tools, patterns, and documentation you build

Here’s what we're looking for:

8+ years of Software Develop Experience

Experience applying AI tools to accelerate development, testing, and documentation  and directing, reviewing, and correcting AI-generated work based on your own understanding of the system

Experience designing, building, and testing production-quality code and architecture for projects that may be technically or organizationally complex

Experience owning a project end-to-end from technical design through rollout while coordinating with product, design, and data partners

Comfortable setting technical direction for a project and making tradeoffs between competing priorities (e.g. customer needs vs. technical needs, short-term vs. long-term)

An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems

Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs

Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment

Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code

Experience building fault-tolerant, reliable software

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $150,000-$170,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $185,000-$205,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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