Principal Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering
Leads end-to-end projects improving Gusto's payroll/tax platform for scalability and compliance. Requires 15+ years experience scaling Ruby/Rails & TypeScript/React apps, system design expertise, and AI/ML knowledge.
About the job
About the Team
Pay Group teams handle product, ops, and service components for onboarding customers, processing payrolls, calculating taxes, paying/filing with tax agencies, and maintaining compliance.
Sub-Teams:
- Tax Accuracy: Gathers/maintains info for accurate, timely tax payments/filings.
- Ledger: Builds payroll ledger for accrual accounting across payroll, risk, payments, accounting.
- Engine: Enables compliant pay with payroll compliance team.
- Platform: Develops common interface for payroll/tax data interactions.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams, keeping engineers unblocked and delivering high-quality work.
- Design, build, and test foundation for compliant payroll for millions.
- Help scale large Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications.
- Collaborate on complex problems with Engineering, Product, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations.
- Mentor and grow fellow engineers on scalable solutions.
- Drive product development from concept to launch.
- Improve team productivity with services, tools, APIs.
- Engage in supportive environment for productivity/innovation.
- Stay up-to-date with AI and Machine Learning, applying to projects.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 15+ years experience.
- Build maintainable, structured, well-documented code.
- Strong knowledge of data structures, data modeling, system design.
- Experience across 3+ teams, influencing product/team direction.
- Platform products depended on company-wide.
- Engineering large-scale production systems.
- Clarity/simplicity in complex problems, communicating to stakeholders.
- Operationalizing/scaling interconnected systems.
- Collaborative, test-driven environment.
- Complex regulated domains (HR, Payroll, Taxes, Compliance).
- AI tools for building/testing/iterating.
- Evaluate AI outputs with success criteria.
- Current on backend tech/AI frameworks; experiment with new approaches.
- Contribute to shared AI tools/templates.
Compensation
$215,000-$252,000/yr (Denver & most remote); $251,000-$295,000/yr (San Francisco, Seattle, New York). Stock equity additional.
Skills
Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, React, System Design, Data Structures, Data Modeling, AI, Machine Learning, Platform Engineering, Scalable Systems
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