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
We're hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to serve as a Technical Lead across multiple pods in the Money Group – Gusto's fastest-growing organization and a cornerstone of the company's transformation into the Small Business Finance Platform.
You'll leverage deep domain expertise to help shape the technical vision for systems that power consumer and business financial health including financial accounts, money movement, lending, expense controls, etc. – ensuring the architecture scales as we grow. This role spans strategy and execution: guiding architectural direction across a group of 15-20 engineers, vetting external partners, prototyping new product lines to unblock product decisions, extracting services from our monolith, and mentoring the engineers around you. You'll be the person who fills whatever role the group needs to hit its goals – from hands-on coding to strategic planning to unblocking other teams.
If you're excited about building financial infrastructure with real impact on the people and businesses that power the modern economy, we'd love for you to join us.
About the Team
Money is Gusto's fastest-growing group, building financial products for both sides of the employment relationship. For small businesses, we're extending the category of employer-facing financial services – bill pay, invoicing, working capital, expense cards, and cash flow insights that help SMBs get paid faster and pay others with confidence. For employees, we build tools that reduce financial stress: on-demand pay, high-yield cash accounts, automated savings, and credit-building features. This is a deeply technical domain spanning payments infrastructure, lending, multi-party integrations, and mobile-first experiences – with the complexity and scale to match.
Together, these teams are building toward a unified financial operating system for small businesses – accounting, banking, payments, lending, and tax – all connected to Gusto's payroll and people platform.
Our unique advantage is Gusto's authority over payroll data, which we leverage to build a payroll-confidence engine no standalone fintech can replicate.
Sub-Teams
Business Money: Business Money is building the financial operating system for small businesses on Gusto. We help owners manage how money flows in and out of their business – from paying bills and running payroll on time, to accessing capital and controlling employee expenses. Our tools (expense management, lending/payroll protection, cash flow insights, invoicing) give business owners more confidence and control over their cash flow so they can focus on building their business. Whether it's a Money Dashboard that flags payroll risks before they happen, or a Payroll Bridge loan that covers a cash shortfall, we're shaping solutions that make a real difference for SMBs.
Consumer Money: Consumer Money exists to help every employee achieve financial peace of mind through the connection between their employment and their personal finances. Our teams build the products that give workers more control over their money – on-demand pay, high-yield cash accounts, automated savings, and credit-building features – all anchored to the paycheck relationship Gusto already powers. We earn a lasting relationship with members by reducing financial stress and helping them keep more of what they earn.
Tax Credits: Tax Credits builds automated tax credit products – starting with R&D credits – directly integrated into Business Money's financial engine. By embedding credit eligibility and filing into the same data model that powers accounting and cash-flow insights, we turn annual tax savings into an automated, always-on lever for small businesses.
Payments: Payments Engineering owns the infrastructure that moves money across Gusto – ACH, real-time payments, disbursements, and fund flows that underpin payroll, lending, and all financial products in the group. This team ensures money moves reliably, compliantly, and increasingly in real time.
Here's what you'll do day-to-day:
- 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.
Here's what we're looking for:
- 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.
Our cash compensation for this role is targeted at $189,000–$236,000 per year in Denver and most remote locations, and $223,000–$278,000 per year in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Stock equity is offered in addition. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the ranges listed above.
At Gusto, we don't use titles the traditional way, as a signal of rank or hierarchy. Instead, our titles describe two things at once — your craft (what you do, e.g. Engineering, Design) and your scope of ownership (what you're accountable for) — which is why you'll see something like "Head of X" instead of a rank word like "Director" that tells you neither. Because of this, the title on this posting may look different from what you'd expect based on the scope and seniority of the role, and from how similar roles are typically titled elsewhere. If you have questions about how this role compares to your current title or level, your recruiter can help translate.
Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.
Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.
When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.
Reliable, consistent presence: We expect regular and predictable attendance, whether you're working in-office, hybrid, or fully remote, so that you stay closely connected to your team, customers, and stakeholders in real time and ensure colleagues and customers receive the timely support and responsiveness they deserve.
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.
Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.
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