Senior Staff Software Engineer, Payments and Risk

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy .

About the Role:

We're hiring engineers to join our Risk Engineering team that works on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Risk system. You'll lead complex technical projects end-to-end by making architectural decisions for your team's systems, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences.

About the Team:

Payments and Risk is responsible for all of the money management and movement operations that are used by our customers across a suite of businesses that all depend on money being moved safely between partners, employers, employees, government authorities and Gusto. In order to enable growth for Gusto and our customers, the Risk organization is responsible for defining best-in-class user experiences in order to mitigate financial and reputation risk. The Risk team is responsible for building the infrastructure for a.) bad actor platform capabilities to prevent fraudsters from abusing Gusto’s platform while improving false positive rate and, b.) the credit underwriting and collections platform to enable faster and greater access to credit while minimizing financial loss. The Payments team will be completely re-architecting the payments platform at Gusto to be able to move money fast and at scale.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, build, and test infrastructure capabilities that enable the Risk team to efficiently build unique, custom tailored experiences for existing and emerging Risk products. Collaborate with the broader Risk organization on platform strategy.
• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world
• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partnerships from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Operations, and other cross-functional teams
• Build the software platform that powers multiple 1st and 3rd party products and serves millions of businesses.
• Mentor and grow fellow engineers working to create holistic and scalable solutions

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with expertise in building scalable Fintech platforms for complex systems

• Experience applying AI tools to accelerate development and improve system reliability. Familiar with using AI for code generation, testing, and documentation.

• Experience building fault-tolerant, mission-critical software as well as designing and developing robust, distributed systems using multiple general-purpose programming languages
• Experience influencing and guiding the work of multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products
• Experience architecting, building, and testing large-scale production level code that is maintainable, structured, and well-documented
• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems
• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs
• Experience in one of these domains is highly preferred: Payments and/or Risk
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React

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 $189,000-$236,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $223,000-$279,000 in San Francisco and New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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.

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.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer .

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice .