Gusto
Senior Staff Software Engineer - Pricing and Packaging
San Francisco, CA · Staff+ · Full-time
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 26 days ago
PythonJavaGoRubyDistributed SystemsCode ReviewGitAPI DevelopmentData ScienceA/B TestingIncident ResponseRecruitingTest AutomationCommunicationMentoring
About the role
- If you're energized by high-stakes platform work at the intersection of engineering excellence and real business impact, this role is for you.
- The Pricing & Packaging team sits at the heart of Gusto's Commerce infrastructure, serving as the single source of truth for all products, bundles, add-ons, subscriptions, pricing, promotions, and discounts across Gusto's first-party customer experience.
- We're a collaborative team of engineers and a data scientist working on quarterly goals and monthly milestones, with a strong emphasis on platform reliability, adoption, and business impact.
Responsibilities
- Lead technical design and architecture for the Commerce Platform including the product catalog, promotion engine, and subscription and entitlement systems, ensuring services are reliable, performant, and meet defined SLOs.
- Partner with product management and cross-functional engineering teams (Growth, Onboarding, Expansion) to define the platform's technical roadmap and drive adoption across Gusto.
- Collaborate with Gusto's marketing and business teams to evolve the self-serve system for managing products, bundles, promotions, and discounts, enabling faster time-to market for new offerings.
- You'll own the architecture and delivery of systems that power how Gusto packages, prices, and delivers its products to over 500,000 small businesses nationwide.
- In this role, you'll partner closely with product, data science, and cross-functional engineering teams to build reliable, scalable platform infrastructure that enables Gusto's growth.
- Drive end-to-end delivery of complex, ambiguous projects: from requirements gathering and technical scoping through implementation, rollout, and post-launch iteration.
- Mentor and grow engineers on the team through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical coaching, fostering a culture of craftsmanship and continuous improvement.
- Own and improve platform observability, reliability, and performance: define and track SLOs, lead incident response, and drive blameless post-mortems to lasting resolution.
- Strong command of distributed systems, API design, and service reliability practices, with experience defining and meeting SLOs in production environments.
- 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.
Requirements
- Demonstrated ability to work effectively with AI tools (such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) in day-to-day engineering, and a growth mindset toward evolving AI capabilities in the team's workflow
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Skills
- Has achieved mastery in at least one programming language (e.g. Ruby, Java, Python, Go)
Compensation
- All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success.
Benefits
- We handle the hard stuff - payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR - so owners can focus on their craft and their customers.
- All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) - because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success.
- Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.
- Proven track record of leading cross-functional technical initiatives, influencing without authority, and aligning engineering, product, and business stakeholders around a shared technical vision
- Stock equity is additional.
Company info
- The team owns and operates Gusto's internal Commerce Platform including the product catalog, promotion engine, subscription, pricing experimentation platform, and entitlement services that enable Growth and other teams to bring Gusto's offerings to market effectively.
- Our work directly shapes how Gusto's 500,000+ small business customers access the payroll, benefits, and HR tools they rely on every day.
- Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
- Leverage AI tools such as code assistants, automated testing, and data-driven diagnostics - to accelerate engineering velocity and establish team-wide best practices for AI-augmented development.
- Here's what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a tech lead or staff engineer role setting technical direction for a team.
This listing is sourced directly from Gusto's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.