Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Canada

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend services and business logic that power Canadian payroll (calculations, compliance, remittances, and related workflows) on Gusto’s Ruby on Rails platform.
• Connect backend logic to the frontend through well-designed GraphQL APIs, partnering with frontend engineers on the full user experience.
• Own a primary domain within Payroll Canada, taking responsibility for correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution as the product and customer base grow.
• Act as a technical partner across Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver accurate, compliant, and customer-impacting solutions.
• Author and drive architecture and design documents, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals as we expand in Canada.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and testing, and help normalize and spread effective AI usage across the team.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development.
• Comfortable venturing into full-stack work when needed, even if your primary strength is backend.
• Experience applying AI tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate development, improve code quality and build testing. Comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible AI-assisted development workflows.
• Experience working in large, complex codebases and a demonstrated ability to improve them incrementally without breaking things. Designing, building, and testing production level code that functions at scale.
• Strong systems thinking and design skills, able to build mental models of unfamiliar systems, ask the right questions, and produce clear analysis others can act on, while designing for performance, scalability, and reliability in production.
• Experience collaborating across teams as a technical partner, communicating technical complexity clearly to product and design partners and helping the team navigate tradeoffs with full context.
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required.
• Interest in or experience with payroll, tax, or compliance domains a plus.