Key skills
Backend software engineeringLarge-scale server-side servicesAPIsDistributed systemsSASTDASTSIEMSCARubyPythonKotlinJavaScriptTypeScriptAuthenticationAuthorizationOpen Policy AgentSpiceDBGraphQLgRPCKubernetesTerraformTraefikFlaskOktaSAMLSSORBACABACAccess controlAbuse detectionData protectionAI coding toolsAILLMGitHubLeadershipCollaboration
About this role
Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, supporting over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. They are hiring a Staff Backend Software Engineer for their Product & AI Security Engineering team to own and evolve the security foundations behind Gusto’s products and AI experiences.
Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and operate authentication and authorization systems that work at Gusto scale
- Strengthen core services and data protections, including access control, storage, and APIs
- Detect and mitigate account takeover and other abuse, improving safety for our customers
- Build security platforms and tooling that help product and AI teams move quickly and safely
- Own and improve high-availability security and identity services that other teams depend on
- Tackle ambiguous AI/LLM security problems from threat modeling to practical mitigations
- Provide leadership in promoting security and software engineering excellence
Requirements:
- 10+ years of experience as a backend engineer, building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs
- Proven track record building secure, highly available distributed systems and services
- Hands-on experience with modern security tooling and practices (e.g., SAST, DAST, SIEM, SCA)
- Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript
- Experience with AI tools for coding (ex: Cloud Code, Cursor, Github Copilot)
- Strong collaboration skills and comfort breaking down complex, cross‑cutting security and AI problems into clear, practical solutions
- Strong backend software engineering skills — you write clean, scalable, well-tested code
- Experience building and operating high-availability services at scale
- Ability to partner cross-functionally and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly
- Genuine interest and desire to grow within the security domain — you don't need to have worked in security before, but you're excited to get started
- Experience with authorization platforms/policy engines (e.g., Open Policy Agent, SpiceDB) and technologies like GraphQL, gRPC, Kubernetes, Terraform, Traefik, Flask, Okta
- Experience with authentication and authorization, such as SAML/SSO, RBAC, and ABAC
- Familiarity with security concepts like access control, abuse detection, or data protection
- Prior work on security tooling or platforms