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Salary: USD 197,000 - 247,000 / annual
Gusto is building a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) product where Gusto becomes a co-employer for small businesses, handling payroll, benefits, workers' compensation, and HR compliance. As a Staff Engineer on PEO Growth, you will own the end-to-end customer experience of PEO adoption—from discovery through full setup—and be accountable for whether customers successfully complete the onboarding journey.
You will set technical direction by turning ambiguous product bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions that scale as the product and audience grow. The role involves building in a regulated domain where quality and accuracy are critical. You'll partner across other app teams to integrate their domains into one coherent customer journey, negotiating ownership boundaries when unclear.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Owning the PEO Onboarding experience end-to-end and being accountable for customer completion rates
- Setting technical direction and creating durable abstractions for a fast-growing product
- Building in a regulated domain with high quality and accuracy requirements
- Partnering across teams to integrate domains into a seamless journey
- Using AI as a normal part of your workflow (coding agents, review, debugging, codebase exploration) and helping build AI-assisted guidance into the onboarding experience
- Instrumenting the funnel, defining success metrics, and using experiments to drive decisions
- Raising the engineering bar through reviews, testing strategy, observability, and judgment calls about pace vs. rigor
The PEO Growth team is a pod of engineers, a product manager, and a designer with a bias toward building and shipping. Much of the work is cross-team design and negotiation, giving you real influence over how the experience gets shaped, not just how it's implemented.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including meaningful time owning customer-facing product surfaces in a large production codebase
- Strong full-stack range: comfortable in mature server-side codebases and modern component-based frontends. Ruby on Rails and React/TypeScript are used and desirable, but depth matters more than specific stack
- Demonstrated AI fluency: you already use AI tooling in day-to-day engineering work, can speak concretely about where it helps and where it doesn't, and keep up as tooling changes
- High ownership in ambiguity: can take fuzzy business needs, shape them into buildable solutions, and ship without waiting for perfect specs; anticipates team needs rather than reacting
- Strong collaborator and influencer across team boundaries with a track record of leveling up engineers around you
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience
- [Bonus] Experience in growth—funnels, conversion, plan and product configuration, or systems that turn purchase decisions into provisioned customers
