Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, providing essential services like payroll and HR. They are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead technical initiatives in the Money Group, focusing on financial products that enhance both consumer and business financial health.
Responsibilities:
- Serve as a Technical Lead across multiple pods in the Money Group – setting architectural direction, unblocking engineers, and ensuring high-quality delivery aligned with long-term goals
- Help define the technical vision for your domain areas within the Money Group, and own the shorter-term projects that move us toward it
- Contribute to the architecture connecting Gusto's People Stack and Finance Stack, owning the pieces within your teams' domains
- Lead service migration from a large Ruby-on-Rails monolith into a service-oriented architecture, defining clean domain boundaries across money movement, lending, and tax
- Manage a complex partner ecosystem, including leading technical due diligence in vendor evaluation
- Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts to de-risk new ideas and unblock product decisions quickly
- Tackle complex, ambiguous problems in close partnership with Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, and Operations
- Drive AI-native architecture decisions – from LLM-powered transaction categorization and tax optimization to conversational financial management experiences
- Act as a technical consultant to your teams and partner teams, contributing to architectural coherence across the group
- Set the bar for technical excellence – through code, design reviews, and the standards you hold the group to
- Mentor fellow engineers, contribute to the growth of senior and staff engineers, and help build healthy, high-performing teams
Requirements:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience (successful applicants typically meet or exceed this)
- Deep, hands-on experience building financial infrastructure in a regulated environment — account/balance management, money movement, card systems, lending, etc
- Proven track record of engineering, scaling, and operating large, interconnected production systems
- Experience contributing to technical vision and driving multi-quarter architectural initiatives across one or more teams, and ensuring strong technical stewards drive execution
- Demonstrated ability to own team-level OKRs and contribute to the group's technical strategy
- Ability to bring clarity to complex problems – communicating technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders, surfacing risks and opportunities early
- A track record of raising the technical bar – through code quality, design rigor, testing and security best practices, and the standards you set for those around you
- Comfort with AI-assisted development tools and a habit of staying current with emerging approaches to building software
- Thrives in a fast-moving environment where priorities shift, new product areas and teams are being stood up, and the ability to move from prototype to production quickly is valued