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Salary: USD 163,000 - 247,000 / annual
Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Cloud Infrastructure team, which builds and operates the AWS foundations that the entire engineering organization depends on. This is a code-driven infrastructure role ideal for someone with DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering background who enjoys solving problems that help other engineers work more effectively.
You will have real autonomy over architecture decisions, Infrastructure-as-Code patterns, and operational standards that every Gusto engineer builds upon. Key opportunities include migrating production applications into a modern AWS multi-account architecture, strengthening disaster recovery and compliance, and improving the speed and reliability of infrastructure tooling.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Building and maintaining AWS infrastructure using Terraform/OpenTofu with changes managed through code rather than manual configuration
- Improving the speed, reliability, and usability of Spacelift workflows used by hundreds of engineers across Gusto
- Partnering with application and infrastructure teams to migrate production services into modern AWS multi-account architecture
- Strengthening disaster recovery and compliance readiness by implementing and testing infrastructure resilience
- Refactoring infrastructure code into modular, reusable components that simplify maintenance and future development
- Supporting engineering teams with cloud infrastructure needs, troubleshooting, and vendor integrations
- Leveraging AI-assisted tools to accelerate infrastructure development, improve troubleshooting, and identify automation opportunities while maintaining high security and reliability standards
- Participating in an on-call rotation focused on internal engineering support, turning recurring issues into automation and lasting improvements
Gusto supports more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide with payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR services. The company has teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs). Travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required. Hybrid employees are expected to work from the office approximately 2-3 days per week.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of hands-on experience in infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering
- Deep, production-level AWS expertise across compute, networking, identity, and security primitives
- Demonstrated mastery of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/OpenTofu strongly preferred; Crossplane, CloudFormation, or similar) including module design, state management, and scalable patterns for large teams
- Experience with multi-account AWS governance — AWS Organizations, OU design, SCPs/RCPs, and federated identity via IAM Identity Center or equivalent SSO
- Hands-on experience with a managed IaC orchestration platform (Spacelift, Terraform Cloud, etc.)
- Experience operating production infrastructure for a customer-facing SaaS platform, including observability (monitoring, logging, alerting) and participating in incident response
- Track record of driving multi-quarter infrastructure initiatives to completion with minimal direction
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- Operating Terraform/OpenTofu at large scale — managing thousands of workspaces or state files, module registries and versioning strategy, drift detection and remediation, and policy-as-code enforcement
- Experience in compliance-regulated environments (SOC 2, PCI, NIST)
- Solid cloud networking foundations: VPC design, IP address management, DNS, egress control, and centralized traffic inspection
