Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy by providing essential services like payroll and HR. The company is seeking an experienced engineer to manage complex migrations and architect high-scale distributed database systems to support its growth.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, deploy, and own the full lifecycle of distributed database systems (TiDB) on Kubernetes at scale, ensuring high availability, data consistency, and operational excellence
• Coordinate complex, zero-downtime migrations from monolithic to distributed architectures, including vertical sharding to isolate Product Services
• Define and drive efficiency improvements across the storage infrastructure through query optimization, caching strategies, and workload management
• Define standards and build reliable automation to ensure data consistency, integrity, and security across distributed systems
• Continuously improve operational excellence by reducing on-call burden through sustainable, long-term solutions
• Partner with product engineering teams and technical collaborators to enable rapid and reliable product development
• Mentor engineers across the Datastores Infrastructure team on best practices for operating complex, self-hosted distributed systems, actively developing our collective operational expertise

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling large-scale infrastructure systems
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed databases on Kubernetes (strongly preferred: TiDB; alternatively: CockroachDB, Vitess, Citus, or similar solutions)
• Deep expertise in distributed data systems including horizontal sharding, partitioning strategies, and distributed transaction management
• Proven experience coordinating complex, zero-downtime migrations affecting production systems at scale
• 5+ years of AWS experience with RDS, Aurora, caching systems (Redis/ValKey), streaming platforms (Kafka), and infrastructure optimization at scale
• Strong communication skills with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, leveraging AI tooling to enhance infrastructure operations, driving improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
• Experience with service extraction and vertical sharding from monolithic architectures
• Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale