Senior Staff Engineer
Senior Staff Engineer guiding end-to-end projects on Gusto's Tax platform, scaling Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React systems, building AI guardrails for compliance, driving technical strategy, and mentoring teams in a regulated domain. Requires 10+ years experience with distributed systems and complex problem solving.
About the job
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.
Skills
Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, React, Distributed Systems, AI Tools, LLMs, Ruby, JavaScript
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