Staff Software Engineer, PEO Benefits

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test the Gusto PEO Benefits experience including benefits shopping and plan-recommendation flows, carrier integrations, MCP tools, and agents that automate operational and customer support processes.
• Mentor other engineers to solve the hardest technical problems in complex domains at large scale.
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and JavaScript/React applications in the world.
• Collaborate with Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, prototype, iterate, and launch solutions.
• Build products that customers genuinely love.
• Operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through launch and long-term iteration, including writing clean frontend code, designing reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and owning post-launch outcomes.
• Leverage AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities.
• Experiment with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely.

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, including scoping, sequencing, unblocking, aligning stakeholders, and working with multiple teams.
• Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities.
• Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams.
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
• Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code.
• Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.
• Travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required.

Nice-to-Haves

• PEO Expertise: 3+ years of experience with PEO, with direct experience building PEO flows in a high-growth environment.
• Experience in, or interest in working in, Ruby on Rails.
• Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment.