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Salary: USD 163,000 - 247,000 / annual
Gusto is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own and build integrations between Gusto and third-party tools used by accounting firms. You'll work on a small, high-ownership team where the roadmap is still being defined, giving you real input into what gets built next.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Own and extend Gusto's existing third-party integrations and build new ones as the portfolio grows
- Design and build reliable backend services using Ruby on Rails and Sidekiq that sync data between Gusto and partner platforms
- Evaluate and help build new integration patterns, including AI agent protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol), as the team expands beyond traditional API integrations
- Help define the technical approach and roadmap as the Integrations domain scales
- Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science teams to validate accountant workflows and iterate based on feedback
- Participate in code review and help establish the technical bar for a team still building its engineering practices
- Mentor other engineers as the team grows
Gusto serves over 500,000 small businesses and handles payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR services. The company has offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, with hybrid expectations of approximately 2-3 days per week in-office.
All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs). 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.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of professional software development experience
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects end-to-end (scoping, planning, execution, stakeholder management, launch)
- Strong platform/application engineering background: services, APIs, third-party integrations, data flows, observability
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, early-stage domains where the roadmap isn't fully defined
- Ruby on Rails experience strongly preferred
- Experience with OAuth and third-party API integrations a plus
- Familiarity with AI agent protocols (e.g., MCP) or agentic integration patterns a plus
- Excellent communication skills to explain technical tradeoffs to engineers and cross-functional partners
- AI-native mindset with AI tools naturally embedded in daily engineering workflow (code generation, review, debugging, documentation)
