Senior Staff Engineer - Tax Platform Engineering

Gusto is a company that provides payroll, health insurance, 401(k), and HR solutions for small businesses. Gusto is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to build and scale core platform capabilities for its Tax platform, including systems that support tax compliance, reliability, and extensibility. The role will guide technical strategy, lead foundational improvements, collaborate across teams, and mentor engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and test the platform that supports tax compliance for millions of people
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
• Improve the productivity and happiness of our teams with the services, tools, and APIs you build
• Build guardrails into the Tax platform that enable Gusto to safely leverage agentic AI to interact with tax concepts in a way that ensures compliance, accuracy, stability, and reliability
• Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation
• Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your team’s domain area in alignment with team and group-level OKRs
• Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture
• Lead improvements to incident response processes, tooling, and culture to enhance system reliability and team effectiveness
• Mentor and develop engineers on your team working to create holistic and scalable solutions. Track record of elevating team capabilities through pairing, code review, and knowledge sharing

Requirements:

• Successful applicants have at least 10+ years of experience
• Experience in designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
• Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products
• Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code
• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
• Enthusiasm for a highly collaborative, test-driven environment
• Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code
• Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software
• Experience building products in highly regulated and high risk domains
• Familiar with current AI tools (LLMs, Agents) and their shortcomings / benefits
• Embeds AI in daily development workflow (scaffolding tests, summarizing docs) to measurably reduce cycle time
• Mentors engineers on effective AI usage and helps develop an AI strategy for other engineers
• Experience in one of these domains is preferred: Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React