- Identify and solve high-impact problems involving technical and organizational complexity that requires understanding and coordination across multiple domains.
- Design the API contracts and agent facing tools our partners and AI agents build on, including what a good interface looks like when the caller is an agent model.
- Engage directly with our developer-customers and internal agent partner to deliver a remarkable payroll product.
- Ship code. Clean, tested, and performant.
- Level up the craft of software engineering across the organization by providing technical guidance and mentoring.
- Inform and maintain best practices for reliability and observability for the team.
- Troubleshoot and resolve production issues.
Here’s what we're looking for
- Experience: 12+ years of professional software development experience. You have been a technical owner for organization-wide engineering initiatives and have played a role in scaling engineering organizations.
- Technical Expertise: You are a Ruby and Rails expert. You have navigated massive Rails applications, worked with Ruby across multiple codebases, and are comfortable working at multiple layers of abstraction.
- Platform Thinker: You've designed and built platforms and public-facing APIs, and have a strong understanding of how to build for reliability and performance at scale.
- Bar Raiser: You've spent time mentoring and raising the technical bar for the entire organization. Others look to you for guidance on how to tackle ambiguous problems and handle competing priorities.
- Effective Communicator: You think in terms of business priorities and know about how to orient your team around the right technical goals for the business as well as how to convey technical constraints and needs to business leaders.
And a few things that would be bonus - genuinely optional
- Payroll domain experience: Payroll, tax or fintech experience is a real head start. It’s also learnable, and we’ll teach it.
- Agent facing tooling: Experience designing interfaces consumed by a model - MCP servers, tool and function definitions or an integration path for AI providers. We care how you think about turning an API into a navigable tool surface.
- GraphQL at scale: You’ve been a client of GraphQL - writing efficient queries, building the query construction and data mapping layer around them, and reasoning about performance when you don’t own the resolvers. You have enough schema fluency to influence the design of APIs other teams own.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $213,000 to $236,000 in Denver & most remote locations, $251,000 to $278,000 in San Francisco, New York and Seattle. 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.
At Gusto, we don't use titles the traditional way, as a signal of rank or hierarchy. Instead, our titles describe two things at once — your craft (what you do, e.g. Engineering, Design) and your scope of ownership (what you're accountable for) — which is why you'll see something like "Head of X" instead of a rank word like "Director" that tells you neither. Because of this, the title on this posting may look different from what you'd expect based on the scope and seniority of the role, and from how similar roles are typically titled elsewhere.
If you have questions about how this role compares to your current title or level, your recruiter can help translate.
Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.
Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.
When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.
Reliable, consistent presence: We expect regular and predictable attendance, whether you're working in-office, hybrid, or fully remote, so that you stay closely connected to your team, customers, and stakeholders in real time and ensure colleagues and customers receive the timely support and responsiveness they deserve.
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.
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