Senior Staff Software Engineer - Payments

About the Role:

Gusto moves hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The Sr. Staff Engineer will be part of the Payments team and will be responsible for a.) building new payments and money movement capabilities across US and International, and b.) (re)architecting our payments platform to scale for the future. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. You’ll collaborate with a talented cross-functional team of Product, Design, and Data partners, focusing on building payments experiences that delight customers. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team

This role is part of the Payments team at Gusto that ensures that our 400,000+ small and medium businesses and millions of their employees are getting paid on time, every time. You will be developing our payments systems that are foundational to the payment solutions offered by Gusto.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Act as a Technical Lead, supporting and unblocking engineers while contributing to long-term technical direction

• Design and build financial data platforms, including Gusto’s internal ledger and reconciliation systems

• Develop and maintain scalable, high-quality backend and frontend components of our customer-facing Payment Profile

• Partner with Accounting and Product teams to create tools that support billing, compliance, and transparency

• Help scale one of the largest Ruby on Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world

• Mentor and grow engineers across multiple domains and technical levels

• Drive projects from concept to launch, focusing on clarity, simplicity, and accuracy in financial and product systems

• Write maintainable, well-documented, and test-driven code

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 12+ years of experience building large-scale software systems, with significant experience in fintech, accounting, or enterprise software

• Experience building or maintaining internal ledgering systems, reconciliation tools, or financial data infrastructure

• Familiarity with accounting principles and close collaboration with accounting or finance stakeholders

• Strong full-stack web app experience (70% backend, 30% frontend), including customer-facing product development

• Deep knowledge of data structures, modeling, and system architecture for mission-critical platforms

• A track record of engineering excellence and thoughtful tradeoffs in complex system design

• Passion for creating clarity and simplicity in technically complex domains

• Enthusiasm for mentoring and collaboration in a highly cross-functional environment

Please note that travel to Gusto’s Denver office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $191,000/yr to $225,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $225,000/yr to $265,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.