Staff Software Engineer, AI Developer Tools

Gusto is dedicated to supporting small businesses and is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join their AI Developer Tools team. The role focuses on architecting AI platforms that enhance developer productivity by reducing friction in the software development lifecycle through advanced AI tools and automation.

Responsibilities:

• Architect AI Core Infrastructure: Design, scale, and maintain the internal platform and APIs that integrate LLMs into the developer workflow, with a heavy focus on autonomous agents, custom retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and smart context-delivery systems
• Drive Technical Leadership & Vision: Establish engineering best practices for building with AI at Gusto, including robust evaluation frameworks (evals), guardrails for code safety, and strategies for optimizing model latency and token spend
• Collaborate & Evangelize: Partner closely with product engineering teams to uncover systemic friction points, and collaborate with core Infrastructure and Security teams to ensure all AI tooling is scalable, compliant, and secure
• Optimize Feedback Loops: Identify and eliminate critical bottlenecks in the local-to-production lifecycle at scale across Gusto
• Maintain Enterprise Reliability: Treat AI infrastructure with production-grade rigor. Monitor system health, diagnose complex integration or networking issues, and mitigate model drift or downtime

Requirements:

• 8+ Years of Systems Expertise: You are a seasoned engineer who is highly comfortable navigating massive, complex codebases and delivering production-grade, distributed software
• Production AI Experience: You have a proven track record of moving AI beyond prototypes. You possess a deep understanding of prompt engineering, fine-tuning, RAG architectures, and orchestrating multi-agent workflows
• Developer-First Mindset: You are passionate about Developer Experience and Productivity. You intuitively understand what makes an internal tool frictionless, fast, and empowering for other engineers
• Strategic Execution: You don't just build wrappers; you think deeply about data privacy, security, cost management, and systemic reliability when deploying AI solutions
• Exceptional Communication: You can seamlessly translate bleeding-edge AI capabilities into clear, actionable infrastructure strategies, mentoring junior engineers and aligning cross-functional stakeholders along the way
• Working as a Team: You work across team boundaries and bring other teams and groups along with you towards our strategic vision