Senior Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity Async

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy .

About the Role:

As an Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Developer Productivity - Async team, you will work on improving developer productivity by enhancing the tools and systems used by product engineers. You will focus on asynchronous processing, ensuring that our applications are efficient, reliable, and scalable. Your work will involve maintaining and improving the infrastructure that supports background jobs and asynchronous communication between our applications using technologies such as Sidekiq and Karafka.

About the Team:

We strive to improve developer productivity through our work on the tools engineers use, the systems we create, and the organizational processes that drive engineering work. We hire technical experts who take a broad view of engineering focused impact and love lifting up their colleagues.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Identify and solve inefficiencies in the tooling, APIs, and feedback mechanisms available to product engineers to improve developer productivity.
• Design, pitch, plan, measure, and implement solutions iteratively, utilizing AI tools to perform large scale code migrations.
• Collaborate closely with product engineering colleagues to anticipate and address upcoming changes.
• Develop and maintain services, abstractions, and architecture to support product engineering.
• Advance the use of Kafka and Sidekiq for asynchronous processing and communication for the growing number of applications at Gusto.
• Harden the async infrastructure to be resilient in the face of heavy loads across a wide variety of use cases.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 12+ years of professional software development experience with a track record of driving impact at scale.
• Systems thinker with a strong ability to communicate effectively.
• Comfortable with architectural thinking and delivering solutions through code.
• Experience with Rails and Ruby, including developer tooling for large engineering teams.
• Ability to work with colleagues as both customers and partners.
• Active working knowledge and architecture experience with Ruby.
• Experience with asynchronous processing using Sidekiq and/or Kafka.
• Proven track record of improving developer productivity through tooling and infrastructure enhancements with the assistance of AI.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000-$230,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $230,000-$270,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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.

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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Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice .