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Salary: USD 199,000 - 247,000 / annual
Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Expansion Experiences team, which focuses on helping small business owners discover and adopt additional Gusto offerings such as plan upgrades, health insurance, 401(k)s, and feature discovery.
In this role, you will operate across the full product lifecycle—from early concept through launch and long-term iteration. You'll write clean frontend code, design and build reliable backend APIs, and bring product and customer-experience judgment to decision-making. The team values engineers who think critically about whether an idea will actually change customer behavior, not just whether it matches the specification.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Design, build, and test customer-facing experiences across recommendations, nurture campaigns, booking flows, and plan upgrade/retention experiences
- Run structured experiments (A/B tests, phased rollouts) to validate whether changes move conversion, adoption, or retention metrics, and iterate quickly based on results
- Design and build reliable backend APIs and data models that support personalization, recommendations, and multi-step customer journeys
- Mentor other engineers and raise the bar on technical execution, product quality, and responsible AI use across the team
- Collaborate with Product Management, Design, Data, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, prototype solutions, and launch features
Gusto operates offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Hybrid employees in these locations are expected to work from the office approximately 2-3 days per week. The company emphasizes AI fluency as a fundamental part of how work gets done, and all team members are expected to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- 8+ years of software development experience
- Product-minded approach: start from customer problems and metrics that matter, comfortable proposing different approaches when data supports it
- Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain, ideally in growth, lifecycle, or conversion-focused contexts (onboarding, upsell flows, personalization, recommendations), or demonstrated ability to think this way
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale
- Comfort designing and interpreting experiments, and working with ambiguous or evolving requirements
- Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact
- Experience with large-scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and strong sense of ownership over product areas
- Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new product capabilities
- Experience with or interest in Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, and TypeScript
- Appreciation for collaborative, test-driven environments
- Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code
- Ability to effectively communicate across engineering teams and with business stakeholders
