Principal Software Engineer, Money Group

Responsibilities

• Serve as a Technical Lead across multiple pods in the Money Group – setting architectural direction, unblocking engineers, and ensuring high-quality delivery aligned with long-term goals.
• Help define the technical vision for your domain areas within the Money Group, and own the shorter-term projects that move us toward it.
• Contribute to the architecture connecting Gusto's People Stack and Finance Stack, owning the pieces within your teams' domains.
• Lead service migration from a large Ruby-on-Rails monolith into a service-oriented architecture, defining clean domain boundaries across money movement, lending, and tax.
• Manage a complex partner ecosystem, including leading technical due diligence in vendor evaluation.
• Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts to de-risk new ideas and unblock product decisions quickly.
• Tackle complex, ambiguous problems in close partnership with Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, and Operations.
• Drive AI-native architecture decisions – from LLM-powered transaction categorization and tax optimization to conversational financial management experiences.
• Act as a technical consultant to your teams and partner teams, contributing to architectural coherence across the group.
• Set the bar for technical excellence – through code, design reviews, and the standards you hold the group to.
• Mentor fellow engineers, contribute to the growth of senior and staff engineers, and help build healthy, high-performing teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• Deep, hands-on experience building financial infrastructure in a regulated environment — account/balance management, money movement, card systems, lending, etc.
• Proven track record of engineering, scaling, and operating large, interconnected production systems.
• Experience contributing to technical vision and driving multi-quarter architectural initiatives across one or more teams.
• Demonstrated ability to own team-level OKRs and contribute to the group's technical strategy.
• Ability to bring clarity to complex problems – communicating technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders, surfacing risks and opportunities early.
• A track record of raising the technical bar – through code quality, design rigor, testing and security best practices.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development tools and a habit of staying current with emerging approaches to building software.
• Thrives in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift, new product areas and teams are being stood up, and the ability to move from prototype to production quickly is valued.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Ruby-on-Rails monolith to service-oriented architecture migrations.
• Experience with payments infrastructure, lending systems, or multi-party financial integrations.