Software Engineer, Financial Data & Payments
About the Role:
We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on the financial backbone of Gusto's money movement — the ledger, reconciliation, and reporting systems that account for every dollar, and the payment profile that determines how employers fund payroll and how employees and contractors get paid. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by driving large technical architectural decisions (focusing on scale and modularity), understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!
About the Team:
Financial Data & Payment Profile (FDPP) sits inside Gusto's Payments organization, which moves money safely between partners, employers, employees, government authorities, and Gusto. FDPP owns the two things that every one of those movements depends on.
Financial Data is the system of record for the money itself: the ledger and subledger behind every payment, the reconciliation that proves our books agree with our banks and partners, the investigation of the variances that surface when they do not, and the financial reporting that Accounting, Finance, and Compliance depend on. When Gusto needs to answer where a dollar is — and prove it — the answer comes from systems this team builds.
Payment Profile is what makes a payment possible in the first place: the payment methods available to a customer, the bank accounts and connections behind them, the verification that makes those accounts trustworthy, and the profile state that decides whether a payment can happen at all. Hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on this being right the first time — and on it recovering gracefully when a bank account, a connection, or a preference changes.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
Design, build, and test the financial data systems that record every dollar Gusto moves — the ledger and subledger that serve as the system of record, the transaction models underneath them, and the financial reporting that Accounting, Finance, Compliance, and our partners rely on to close the books
Build reconciliation at Gusto's scale: prove that our internal records agree with bank, processor, and partner statements, and make the breaks that fall out of that comparison traceable rather than mysterious
Lead variance investigation end-to-end — the tooling, instrumentation, and runbooks that turn "the numbers don't tie" into a specific root cause, and then into a fix that eliminates the whole class of break
Own the payment profile: how employers are set up to fund payroll and how employees and contractors are set up to be paid — the payment methods available and the rules that govern which apply to whom, the bank accounts and connections behind them, and the verification state that determines whether money can move at all
Make setup and verification something a small business can finish on its own — instant bank verification, graceful handling of broken or revoked connections, and a clear path back to a payable state when something changes
Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Accounting, Finance, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions
Here’s what we're looking for:
Successful applicants have at least 10+ years of experience and the enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment
Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software as well as designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products
Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code that is maintainable, structured, and well-documented
An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
Experience in one or more of these domains is strongly preferred: ledger or subledger design, financial reconciliation, accounting systems, or payments infrastructure
Comfort with double-entry accounting concepts — journal entries, chart of accounts, debits and credits, and tying a subledger out to the general ledger — and the ability to work with accountants and controllers in their own vocabulary
Experience building systems where correctness, auditability, and immutability matter more than raw throughput, and where a silent data error is worse than an outage
Bonus: Experience with bank account verification, payment rails (ACH, wire, RTP), or third-party banking data and verification providers
Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React