Staff Software Engineer, Tax Accounts

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 a seasoned full-stack software engineer to join Tax Accounts — the team whose job is to make the complexity of dealing with hundreds of tax agencies disappear. We're the steward of every Gusto customer's employer and employee tax account data: the registrations, authorizations, rates, and setup that let us withhold, pay, and file correctly on their behalf. Get it right and businesses stay compliant without thinking about it; get it wrong and it costs them real money and trust.

As a Staff Software Engineer on Tax Accounts, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: clean frontend code, reliable backend APIs and data models against a genuinely complex compliance domain, and the automation that keeps hundreds of thousands of accounts in sync with the agencies behind them. If you want technical craft with far-reaching impact in our modern economy helping power the livelihoods of millions of small business employees — join us.

• Design, build, and test the systems behind employer and employee tax accounts: agency registrations, power-of-attorney / third-party authorizations, tax notices, agency filings, and state/federal/employee tax setup across jurisdictions

• Build automation that requests and maintains access with tax agencies on the customer's behalf — the bots, data exchanges, and agency-event pipelines that keep accounts, rates, and deposit schedules accurate and prevent failed filings

• Model complex, jurisdiction-specific compliance rules into maintainable systems, and own reliability, performance, and correctness in a domain where accuracy is non-negotiable

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Tax Operations, and PEO teams to turn customer and compliance pain into solutions — then prototype, iterate, and launch

• Mentor other engineers and help the team solve some of the hardest problems in a very complex domain, at large scale

• Build products that our customers genuinely love

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

• Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale

• Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain, and a strong sense of ownership over reliability, performance, and correctness

• Comfort designing data models and APIs for a complex, rules-heavy domain (compliance, tax, payments, or similar) where edge cases and correctness matter

• Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development,