Staff Software Engineer- Retirement

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

You’ll be a key engineer focused on building and owning the systems that allow tens of thousands of businesses to offer and manage 401(k)s. This is a very hands-on role: owning full stack services and APIs end-to-end, shipping production code, and evolving the architecture to support future needs. You’ll partner closely with product, compliance, and operations to turn complex financial requirements into reliable software. If you like solving hard problems and having a real impact on people’s lives, then we want to work with you.

The Core 401(k) team makes offering a 401(k) to employees a no brainer for every company. We’re responsible for ensuring companies don’t have to think about complex laws, rules, and regulations. We build features and capabilities for small businesses that are often unavailable through legacy providers. What we do matters. Hundreds of thousands of people are trusting us with their retirement, and that’s something we never lose sight of.

• Design, build, maintain, and ship services and features that allow companies to offer and manage 401(k)s to their employees.

• Identifying opportunities to extend and modify the architecture of existing systems to support new capabilities

• Identify, codify, and evangelize engineering best practices

• Partner with product, design, and operations to scope work and deliver production-ready solutions.

• Debug production issues and improve reliability, observability, and operational tooling.

• Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate with shared systems and platforms.

• Write clear, reliable, well-tested code that ships quickly and scales well.

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production products or platforms.

• Comfortable working across teams and gaining influence to drive projects forward.

• Strong experience with services and APIs.

• Strong experience with message based systems (Sidekiq, SQS, NServiceBus, etc.) Experience with GraphQL.

• Good experience with large modern frontend applications (like React).

• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including production support and operational work.

• Experience working closely with PMs and cross-functional partners to deliver scoped work.

• Pragmatic, execution-focused approach to engineering.

• Comfortable working with and influencing other teams to maximize impact

• Clear communicator and collaborative teammate.

• Experience with Ruby on Rails (or a comparable backend