Staff Software Engineer, Embedded Payroll, Developer Experience

About the Role:

As a Staff Software Engineer focused on Developer Experience on the Embedded Payroll team, you'll be a key technical contributor improving how developers build on top of Gusto's payroll platform. You'll operate at the intersection of platform engineering, API design, and developer experience working hands-on in our codebase while contributing to the direction of tooling, interfaces, and workflows that make it easier for internal teams and external partners to build reliably and efficiently. This role requires strong technical judgment, empathy for developers and solution architects, and the ability to translate friction into scalable platform improvements.

About the Team:

Gusto Embedded Payroll is a platform that allows developers to embed payroll directly into their own software using our APIs. We've taken Gusto’s robust payroll infrastructure and made it available to third-party developers. Our vision is to enable anyone to build the best payroll product for their end customers - powering payroll for small and medium businesses across a variety of industries, from vertical SaaS to fintech and neobanks.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Identify high-leverage opportunities to improve developer experience across our APIs, tooling, documentation, and workflows
• Partner closely with internal product, solution architect, and engineering teams to define solutions for reducing friction when integrating with Embedded Payroll
• Engage directly with external developers to understand pain points, validate solutions, and contribute to platform direction
• Design and evolve APIs, abstractions, and interfaces with a focus on clarity, consistency, and long-term maintainability
• Build and maintain developer-facing tools, libraries, and internal frameworks that improve velocity and reliability
• Lead by example through hands-on development, shipping clean, tested, and well-designed code
• Set and promote best practices for reliability, observability, and backwards compatibility in developer-facing systems

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years of professional software development experience with demonstrated technical leadership within your team and organization. You have a track record of improving developer productivity and platform capabilities.
• Strong backend engineering expertise, with deep experience working in large, production systems (Ruby on Rails experience is a plus). You're comfortable working across multiple layers of abstraction and making pragmatic tradeoffs.
• You've designed APIs, platforms, or tools with developers as your primary customer. You care deeply about usability, documentation, error handling, and the end-to-end experience of building on a platform.
• You've spent time mentoring engineers on your team and within the Embedded Payroll organization, raising the technical bar through code reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing. Engineers on your team and in your group look to you for guidance on how to tackle ambiguous problems.
• You think in terms of business priorities and know 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.
• Experience applying AI tools (LLMs, Cursor, Copilot, Agents) to accelerate development, improve code quality, and deliver scalable developer-facing systems. Familiar with how AI tools can improve developer productivity and willing to mentor others on effective AI usage.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $190,000-$220,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $220,000-$260,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.