Senior Staff Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test the platform that supports tax compliance for millions of people.
• 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, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams.
• Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build.
• Build guardrails into the Tax platform that enable Gusto to safely leverage agentic AI to interact with tax concepts in a way that ensures compliance, accuracy, stability, and reliability.
• Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your team’s domain area in alignment with team and group-level OKRs.
• Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture.
• Lead improvements to incident response processes, tooling, and culture to enhance system reliability and team effectiveness.
• Mentor and develop engineers on your team working to create holistic and scalable solutions.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience.
• Experience in 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.
• 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 highly collaborative, test-driven environment.
• Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code.
• Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software.
• Experience building products in highly regulated and high risk domains.
• Familiar with current AI tools (LLMs, Agents) and their shortcomings / benefits.
• Embeds AI in daily development workflow (scaffolding tests, summarizing docs) to measurably reduce cycle time.
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy for other engineers.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in one of these domains: Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, and React.