Software Engineer – Tax Platform

Job Description

Senior Staff Engineer – Tax Platform Engineering | Gusto

The Tone:
This is a full-time hybrid role at Gusto, with an expectation to work from the San Francisco office 2-3 days per week. Gusto empowers small businesses by managing essential functions like payroll, health insurance, and HR. This Senior Staff Engineer role is vital for advancing the core Tax platform, ensuring compliance, and simplifying complex processes for hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the nation.

The TL;DR
• Role: Full Time
• Type: Full-time
• Location: Hybrid – San Francisco, CA
• Pay: $223000–$278000 yearly
• Team: Tax team, focusing on managing all aspects of payroll taxes (setup, calculation, payments, filings, and year-end communications).
• Mission: To design seamless, end-to-end experiences and build reliable infrastructure that makes complex tax processes simple and accurate for employers.
• Tech Stack: Ruby, Rails, TypeScript, React, AI tools (LLMs, Agents).

What You’ll Actually Do
• Platform Engineering: Design, build, and test the core platform capabilities that support tax compliance for millions of people.
• System Enhancement: Improve existing systems for extensibility and scalability, taking them closer to desired long-term architectural states.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partners from Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, and Operations.
• Productivity & AI Integration: Improve team productivity with services, tools, and APIs, and integrate guardrails into the Tax platform to safely leverage agentic AI for compliance, accuracy, and reliability.
• Technical Leadership: Own and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for your team’s domain, identifying long-term investments and leading improvements to incident response processes.
• Mentorship: Mentor and develop engineers on your team, actively elevating capabilities through pairing, code review, and knowledge sharing to create holistic and scalable solutions.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Senior Staff Engineer. Preference for experience in Payroll, Taxes, or Compliance domains within highly regulated and high-risk environments.
• Experience: At least 10+ years of engineering experience, including designing and developing robust, distributed systems and influencing multiple teams on scaling, refactoring, and optimizing legacy products.
• Skills: Expertise in architecting, building, and testing large-scale production-level code, with a focus on fault-tolerance and mission-critical reliability. Proven ability to bring clarity and simplicity to complex problems, communicate technical complexity, and facilitate informed tradeoffs. Familiarity with current AI tools (LLMs, Agents) and the ability to embed AI in daily development workflows to measurably reduce cycle time is also required.
• Bonus: Experience with Ruby on Rails, Typescript, and React.