Staff Software Engineer, HR Experiences

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test across Gusto's HR experience — the employer-facing document and guidance tools, and the employee-facing side of that same experience.
• Build AI tools and agents that help scale Gusto's HR Partners team, automating the compliance and document workflows human HR partners handle today.
• Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale.
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world.
• Collaborate with our Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch.
• Build products that our customers genuinely love.
• Operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through to launch and long-term iteration. This includes writing clean frontend code, designing and building reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and taking ownership of what happens after a feature ships.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale.
• Experience driving large, cross-functional projects end-to-end through ambiguity — scoping, sequencing, and unblocking without needing the problem pre-broken-down; aligning multiple stakeholders and working with multiple teams.
• Actively uses agentic coding tools (for example, Claude Code or Codex) as part of your daily engineering workflow, and has used them to meaningfully accelerate yourself and others.
• Experience with, or strong interest in, building agents and MCP tools — and judgment about applying them safely in domains where "mostly right" isn't good enough.
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
• 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.

Nice-to-Haves

• Compliance/HR Domain Expertise: experience building products in regulated, compliance-heavy domains (HR, payroll, benefits, tax, or similar), especially where requirements vary by state or locality.