Staff Software Engineer, HR Experiences

We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join Gusto's HR Experience team.

Half the American workforce works at a small business, and most of those businesses can't afford a real HR team. When they hit an HR decision they don't have the expertise for — a termination, a comp change, setting a time-off policy for the first time — they either pay for expensive outside help or guess, even though the right answer depends on rules that vary across 50 states and hundreds of localities. HR Experience is building that expertise directly into Gusto: compliant HR guidance and documentation, built natively for both the employer creating it and the employee receiving it, in a domain where the compliance bar is real — "mostly right" isn't good enough.

You'll also help drive the other half of HR Experience's mission: using AI to make Gusto's human HR Partners faster and more effective, so more small businesses can get real HR support without needing to hire their own HR team.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through to launch and long-term iteration. That means writing clean frontend code, designing and building reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and taking ownership of what happens after a feature ships.

If you're drawn to work that combines technical craft with real-world impact — helping small businesses get HR infrastructure they can actually rely on — join us!

Here's what you'll do day-to-day:

Design, build, and test across Gusto's HR experience — the employer-facing document and guidance tools, and the employee-facing side of that same experience

Build AI tools and agents that help scale Gusto's HR Partners team, automating the compliance and document workflows human HR partners handle today

Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale

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

Collaborate with our Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch

Build products that our customers genuinely love

Here's what we're looking for:

Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience

Compliance/HR Domain Expertise (Preferred): experience building products in regulated, compliance-heavy domains (HR, payroll, benefits, tax, or similar), especially where requirements vary by state or locality

Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale

Experience driving large, cross-functional projects end-to-end through ambiguity — scoping, sequencing, and unblocking without needing the problem pre-broken-down; aligning multiple stakeholders and working with multiple teams

Actively uses agentic coding tools (for example, Claude Code or Codex) as part of your daily engineering workflow, and has used them to meaningfully accelerate yourself and others

Experience with, or strong interest in, building agents and MCP tools — and judgment about applying them safely in domains where "mostly right" isn't good enough

Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact

Others:

Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails

Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment

Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code

Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders

Please note that travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $199,000–$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.