Senior Software Engineer, Embedded Payroll , Developer

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k) s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve.

Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

As Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Embedded Payroll team, you act as a technical leader shaping how developers build on Gusto’s payroll platform. The role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, API design, and developer experience. It combines hands‑on work in the codebase with setting direction for tools, interfaces, and workflows used by internal teams and external partners. Success requires strong technical judgment, empathy for developers and solution architects, and the ability to turn friction into scalable platform improvements.

Gusto Embedded Payroll is a platform that allows developers to embed payroll directly into their own software using our APIs. We've taken Gusto’s robust payroll infrastructure and made it available to third‑party developers. Our vision is to enable anyone to build the best payroll product for their end customers—powering payroll for small and medium businesses across a variety of industries, from vertical SaaS to fintech and neobanks.

• Identify high‑leverage opportunities to improve developer experience across our APIs, tooling, documentation, and workflows.
• Partner closely with internal product, solution architect, and engineering teams to define a vision for reducing friction when integrating with Embedded Payroll.
• Engage directly with external developers to understand pain points, validate solutions, and influence platform direction.
• Design and evolve APIs, abstractions, and interfaces with a focus on clarity, consistency, and long‑term maintainability.
• Build and maintain developer‑facing tools, libraries, and internal frameworks that improve velocity and reliability.
• Lead by example through hands‑on development, shipping clean, tested, and well‑designed code.
• Set and promote best practices for reliability, observability, and backwards compatibility in developer‑facing systems.

• 12+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated ownership of organization‑wide engineering initiatives and contributions to scaling engineering organizations.
• Deep backend engineering expertise, including experience operating large, production‑grade systems, with comfort working across multiple layers of abstraction and making pragmatic technical trade‑offs.
• Proven experience designing APIs, platforms, or developer tools with developers as the primary customer, with strong attention to usability, documentation, error handling, and end‑to‑end developer experience.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, raise the technical bar across teams, and provide guidance on ambiguous problems and competing priorities.
• Strong business acumen, with the ability to align technical direction to business priorities and clearly communicate constraints, trade‑offs, and needs to non‑technical stakeholders.
• Curiosity and effectiveness in leveraging intelligence, automation, and experimentation to design, ship, and operate reliable, partner‑facing payroll APIs at scale.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000–$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000–$270,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto’s subsidiary, whose physical office is in…