Senior Staff Software Engineer - Pricing and Packaging
Lead technical architecture and delivery for Gusto's internal Commerce Platform powering pricing, packaging, subscriptions, and entitlements. Own platform reliability, mentor engineers, and drive cross-functional initiatives for 500k+ small business customers.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead technical design and architecture for the Commerce Platform including the product catalog, promotion engine, and subscription and entitlement systems
- Ensure services are reliable, performant, and meet defined SLOs
- Partner with product management and cross-functional engineering teams (Growth, Onboarding, Expansion) to define the platform’s technical roadmap and drive adoption
- Drive end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous projects from requirements gathering and technical scoping through implementation, rollout, and post-launch iteration
- Mentor and grow engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical coaching
- Leverage AI tools such as code assistants, automated testing, and data-driven diagnostics to accelerate engineering velocity
- Own and improve platform observability, reliability, and performance: define and track SLOs, lead incident response, and drive blameless post-mortems
- Collaborate with marketing and business teams to evolve the self-serve system for managing products, bundles, promotions, and discounts
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a tech lead or staff engineer role setting technical direction
- Mastery in at least one programming language (Ruby, Java, Python, Go)
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale backend platform systems, ideally in commerce, billing, subscription management, pricing and packaging domain
- Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and service reliability practices with experience defining and meeting SLOs
- Demonstrated ability to work effectively with AI tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar)
- Proven track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives and influencing without authority
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with pricing experimentation platforms and entitlement services
Skills
Ruby, Java, Python, Go, Distributed Systems, API Design, SLOs, Observability, Incident Response, Github Copilot, Claude Code
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