Staff Software Engineer, HR Experiences

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.

We're looking for seasoned full-stack software engineers to join Gusto's HR Experience team.

Half the American workforce works at a small business, and most of those businesses can't afford a real HR team. When they hit an HR decision they don't have the expertise for — a termination, a comp change, setting a time-off policy for the first time — they either pay for expensive outside help or guess, even though the right answer depends on rules that vary across 50 states and hundreds of localities. HR Experience is building that expertise directly into Gusto: compliant HR guidance and documentation, built natively for both the employer creating it and the employee receiving it, in a domain where the compliance bar is real — "mostly right" isn't good enough.

You'll also help drive the other half of HR Experience's mission: using AI to make Gusto's human HR Partners faster and more effective, so more small businesses can get real HR support without needing to hire their own HR team.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: shaping features from early spec and design through to launch and long-term iteration. That means writing clean frontend code, designing and building reliable backend APIs, influencing product direction, and taking ownership of what happens after a feature ships.

If you're drawn to work that combines technical craft with real-world impact — helping small businesses get HR infrastructure they can actually rely on — join us!

• Design, build, and test across Gusto's HR experience — the employer-facing document and guidance tools, and the employee-facing side of that same experience

• Build AI tools and agents that help scale Gusto's HR Partners team, automating the compliance and document workflows human HR partners handle today

• Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale

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

• Collaborate with our Product Management, Data, Design, and Platform Engineering teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch

• Build products that our customers genuinely love

• Successful applicants typically have 8+ years of software development experience

• Compliance/HR Domain Expertise (Preferred): experience building products in regulated, compliance-heavy domains (HR, payroll, benefits, tax, or similar), especially where requirements vary by state or locality

• Experience owning