Staff Software Engineer (Professional Employer Organization)

• Gusto is building a PEO (Professional Employer Organization): a product where Gusto becomes a co-employer for small businesses, taking on payroll, benefits, workers’ compensation, and HR compliance so owners don’t have to assemble it themselves
• It’s one of the biggest strategic bets in the company
• As a Staff Engineer on PEO Growth, you’ll own the path from how a business discovers PEO all the way to getting the business fully set up
• The decisions you make here shape whether a small business can adopt one of the most consequential products we’ve ever shipped, or give up halfway through
• PEO Growth owns the customer experience of adopting the PEO — the end-to-end journey that takes a business from interested to fully up and running
• Much of what that journey depends on is built by other teams across Gusto, so our job is to make it feel like one coherent product rather than a series of handoffs
• That makes the work as much cross-team design and negotiation as it is code, and it means you’ll have real influence over how the experience gets shaped, not just how it’s implemented
• The team is a pod of engineers, product manager, and designer with a bias towards building and shipping
• Own the PEO Onboarding experience end to end — how a business learns about the PEO, commits to it, and gets set up on it — and be accountable for whether customers make it all the way through
• Set technical direction: turn ambiguous product bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions that hold up as the product and its audience grow
• Build in a regulated domain where quality and accuracy is critical
• Partner across other app teams to integrate their domains into one coherent journey, and negotiate the seams when ownership is unclear
• Use AI as a normal part of how you work — coding agents, review, debugging, and codebase exploration — and help build AI-assisted guidance into the onboarding experience itself so customers get unstuck without waiting on a human
• Instrument the funnel and make decisions from it: define what “onboarding is working” means, measure it, and use experiments rather than intuition to decide what to change
• Raise the engineering bar in a fast-moving area — reviews, testing strategy, observability, and the judgment calls about where to build carefully and where to move fast

Benefits

• Gender-affirming care and support
• Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
• A variety of mental health resources
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
• Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
• Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more

• Demonstrated AI fluency: you already use AI tooling in your day-to-day engineering work, can speak concretely about where it helps and where it doesn’t, and you keep up as the tooling changes
• Strong full-stack range: comfortable in a mature server-side codebase and in a modern component-based frontend. Ruby on Rails and React/TypeScript are what we use and are desirable, but we care more about depth than the specific stack
• [Bonus] Experience in growth — funnels, conversion, plan and product configuration, or the systems that turn a purchase decision into a provisioned customer
• High ownership in ambiguity. You can take a fuzzy business need, shape it into something buildable, and ship it without waiting for a perfect spec — and you anticipate what the team will need next instead of reacting to it
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time owning customer-facing product surfaces in a large production codebase
• A strong collaborator and influencer across team boundaries, with a track record of leveling up the engineers around you
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience