Gusto is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Integrated Benefits team. You will own and evolve key architectural areas within the platform, driving improvements for scalability, extensibility, and resilience. This role has high autonomy and scope to shape the future of Gusto's Benefits ecosystem.

What You'll Do

Own and evolve the architecture for key areas of the Integrated Benefits platform, ensuring systems are scalable, reliable, and adaptable.
Drive architectural decisions and technical strategy within your domain, making informed tradeoffs.
Contribute to the technical roadmap for your area, aligning work with team objectives and broader Benefits engineering priorities.
Design and build shared platform capabilities that support Voluntary Life and Disability (vLiDi) products and broker integrations.
Lead the technical approach to complex, ambiguous problem spaces, partnering with product, design, and cross-functional stakeholders.
Identify cross-team dependencies and influence alignment on architectural patterns, standards, and best practices.
Raise the technical bar by mentoring engineers through design reviews and architectural guidance.
Apply AI tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and enable intelligent product capabilities.
Contribute to shared tooling, patterns, or standards that enable safe and effective experimentation, including AI-driven workflows.

What We're Looking For

10+ years of software engineering experience building and supporting production software systems.
Significant experience designing and evolving complex backend systems, including deep experience in Ruby on Rails–based environments.
Demonstrated ability to own architectural decisions within a product domain and influence technical direction across teams.
Experience building or contributing to platform capabilities or shared systems depended on by multiple teams.
Strong foundation in system design, data modeling, and working with complex, interconnected production systems.
Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces and leading technical decision-making through uncertainty.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence engineers and cross-functional partners without formal authority.
Experience applying AI tools in production engineering workflows to improve development velocity, system quality, or product behavior.
Familiarity with evaluating AI-driven outputs using well-defined success criteria and operational constraints.

Nice to Have

Experience working in highly regulated domains such as Benefits, Payroll, HR, Taxes, or Compliance.
Experience designing or evolving large-scale integration platforms or service-oriented architectures.
Prior work supporting external partners or third-party integrations.
Experience contributing to internal developer platforms, shared tooling, or technical standards.
Exposure to AI-driven systems beyond experimentation, including monitoring, evaluation, or governance.

Technical Stack

Ruby on Rails

Team & Environment

This role sits within Gusto's broader Benefits organization.

Benefits & Compensation

Salary: $223,000/yr to $265,000/yr
Stock equity is additional.

Work Mode

This is a hybrid role open to candidates in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City.

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, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.