# Staff Software Engineer, Tax Accounts

**Company:** [Gusto](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/gusto)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA, New York, NY
**Role:** Fullstack Engineering
**Salary:** $197k – $247k/yr
**Experience:** 8+ years
**Skills:** Ruby on Rails, Data Modeling, API Design, AI Tools, Mentorship, Scalable Systems, compliance systems, tax domain knowledge, automation pipelines, test-driven development
**Posted:** 2026-07-31

> Staff Software Engineer building and owning complex tax account systems, automations, and compliance models for Gusto to ensure accurate withholding, payments, and filings for small businesses across hundreds of jurisdictions. Requires 8+ years experience, staff-level leadership, and comfort with rules-heavy domains.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Design, build, and test the systems behind employer and employee tax accounts: agency registrations, power-of-attorney / third-party authorizations, tax notices, agency filings, and state/federal/employee tax setup across jurisdictions.
- Build automation that requests and maintains access with tax agencies on the customer's behalf — the bots, data exchanges, and agency-event pipelines that keep accounts, rates, and deposit schedules accurate and prevent failed filings.
- Model complex, jurisdiction-specific compliance rules into maintainable systems, and own reliability, performance, and correctness in a domain where accuracy is non-negotiable.
- Partner closely with Product, Design, Tax Operations, and PEO teams to turn customer and compliance pain into solutions — then prototype, iterate, and launch.
- Mentor other engineers and help the team solve some of the hardest problems in a very complex domain, at large scale.
- Build products that our customers genuinely love.

## Requirements
- Significant software-development experience, typically 8+ years, with demonstrated staff-level technical leadership.
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale.
- Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain, and a strong sense of ownership over reliability, performance, and correctness.
- Comfort designing data models and APIs for a complex, rules-heavy domain (compliance, tax, payments, or similar) where edge cases and correctness matter.
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new capabilities — plus curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, and a habit of sharing best practices to scale AI use safely across the team.
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
- Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.

## Nice-to-Haves
- 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.

## Compensation
- Cash compensation targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional.
- Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise.

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/25a9b361-ece2-463a-85e8-6cb0793580c4
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/25a9b361-ece2-463a-85e8-6cb0793580c4