Staff Software Engineer, Retirement Money Planning

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. 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.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role:

You'll be a key full-stack engineer focused on building and owning the systems that empower over a million savers (including entrepreneurs) to save for their retirement via 401(k)s, IRAs, and more. This is a very hands-on role: owning backend services and APIs end-to-end, building the interfaces savers use to manage their accounts, and working through real financial edge cases. You'll partner closely with Product, Design, Compliance, and Operations to turn complex financial requirements into reliable software. If you like solving hard problems and having a real impact on people's lives, then we want to work with you.

About the Team:

The Money Planning team owns the user experience for employees, savers, and entrepreneurs to manage their retirement and savings. We build features and capabilities for savers to manage their contributions, portfolios, and withdrawals. What we do matters. People are trusting us with their retirement, and that's something we never lose sight of.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, build, and test the experience that enables savers to manage their 401(k)s, IRAs, and more

• Contribute to the architecture of existing systems to support new capabilities

• Apply AI tools as a regular part of your engineering workflow, and bring an AI-native lens to product decisions: identify where AI can reduce saver effort, simplify complex retirement decisions, and surface proactive guidance before savers know they need it

• Advocate for the needs of our savers and entrepreneurs who rely on Gusto to help them save for retirement correctly and confidently

• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems with partners across Engineering, Product Management, Design, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams

• Engage in a highly supportive environment working with others to drive productivity and innovation

• Debug production issues and improve reliability, observability, and operational tooling

• Identify and prioritize long-term investments to improve foundational systems and architecture

• Write clear, reliable, well-tested code that ships quickly and scales well

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production products or platforms

• Strong experience working across teams and gaining influence to drive projects forward

• Strong experience with services and APIs

• Strong experience with message-based systems (Sidekiq, Kafka, etc.)

• Experience with Ruby on Rails a must have

• Strong experience with large modern frontend applications (like React)

• Experience with GraphQL

• Comfortable owning systems end-to-end, including production support and operational work

• Experience working closely with PMs and cross-functional partners to deliver scoped work

• Pragmatic, execution-focused approach to engineering

• Comfortable working with and influencing other teams to maximize impact

• Clear communicator and collaborative teammate

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