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Salary: USD 225,000 - 275,000 / annual
Gusto is a mission-driven platform serving 500,000+ small businesses by handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR. The company is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to own outcomes across the expansion funnel—from the moment a customer's need surfaces through to ongoing value adoption.
In this role, you'll have real autonomy to shape the technical approach, partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to decide what's worth building, and call the shots on what to test now versus later. You'll flag technical investments the team needs before they become urgent and drive retained and expansion revenue.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Owning outcomes across the full expansion funnel, not just a single surface or feature
- Shaping technical approach and architecture behind recommendations and conversion journeys to create a foundation for other initiatives
- Making sharp scoping calls: shipping the simplest version that proves or disproves an idea, then iterating based on learnings
- Designing experiments and using ambiguous or noisy data to decide what's worth scaling versus cutting
- Partnering independently with Product, Design, and Data Science to shape the roadmap
- Raising the engineering bar through pragmatic technical direction, strong code review, and mentoring engineers; delegating scoped work once ready
Gusto operates hybrid offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, with expectations of 2-3 days per week in-office for those locations. The company emphasizes AI fluency as fundamental to how work gets done and expects all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- 10+ years of software development experience, including building and shipping full-stack, customer-facing products at scale
- Product-minded engineer who starts from customer problems and metrics that matter; operates independently across product, design, and data partners
- Experience in growth, lifecycle, or conversion-focused contexts (onboarding, upsell flows, personalization, recommendations) or demonstrated ability to think this way
- Demonstrated ability to move quickly and execute with high quality; ships, measures, and iterates rather than waiting for perfect certainty
- Experience owning multi-quarter initiatives end-to-end, from early concept through measurable business impact
- Comfort navigating ambiguity and leading peers through influence without formal authority
- Experience with large-scale refactors, performance and reliability work, and strong technical ownership over product area
- Track record of mentoring engineers and helping teams scale impact; knows when to delegate scoped work
- Track record of spotting technical or product opportunities before being asked and building the case to prioritize them
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities
- Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
- Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders
Nice to have: Experience with Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, and TypeScript.
