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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.
The PEO Growth team owns the coherent customer experience across multiple internal teams and domains. Your role is as much about cross-team design and negotiation as it is about code. You'll have real influence over how the experience gets shaped, not just how it's implemented. The team consists of engineers, a product manager, and a designer with a bias toward building and shipping.
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Owning the PEO Onboarding experience end-to-end and being accountable for customer completion rates
- Setting technical direction by turning ambiguous product bets into designs, sequencing, and durable abstractions that scale
- Building in a regulated domain where quality and accuracy are critical
- Partnering across other app teams to integrate their domains into one coherent journey and negotiating ownership boundaries
- 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 so customers can self-serve
- Instrumenting the funnel and making data-driven decisions: defining what "onboarding is working" means, measuring it, and using experiments to decide what to change
- Raising the engineering bar in a fast-moving area through code reviews, testing strategy, observability, and judgment calls about where to build carefully versus move fast
Gusto supports over 500,000 small businesses and has teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. The company is on a mission to grow the small business economy by handling the hard stuff so owners can focus on their craft and customers. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs). AI fluency is expected across all team members.
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 at Gusto and are 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 something buildable, and ship without waiting for perfect specs; anticipate what the team needs next
- 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)
