Sr Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, providing essential services like payroll and HR to over 500,000 small businesses. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer for Database Infrastructure to evolve their data storage and access systems, focusing on building platforms for engineering teams and ensuring the reliability of existing databases.

Responsibilities:

• Build the tooling and platform that let engineering teams provision and access new datastores, and evaluate and pilot highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems to meet Gusto's growing needs
• Take ownership of Kafka, from capacity planning and partitioning through performance tuning and reliability at scale, and help stand up and operate new non-relational datastores like DynamoDB
• Coordinate migrations and topology changes across the datastore platform (MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka) with minimal disruption to production
• Drive efficiency and reliability improvements across the platform through query and consumer optimization, caching strategies, and workload management, backed by strong automation and standards for data consistency, integrity, and security
• Participate in on-call and drive long-term, sustainable reductions in operational burden
• Partner with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development, and share knowledge to grow the team's collective operating expertise

Requirements:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems, with deep hands-on expertise in streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and/or non-relational datastores (DynamoDB or similar) in production at scale
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—partitioning, replication, consistency models, and failure modes—and proven experience coordinating migrations or topology changes in production with minimal disruption
• Experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, including caching systems like Redis/ValKey and streaming platforms like Kafka, with a track record of driving infrastructure optimization at scale
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, using AI tooling to drive improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
• Experience with self-hosted distributed databases on Kubernetes (e.g., TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, or Citus), horizontal sharding, or service/vertical extraction from monolithic architectures
• Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale