Senior Staff Software Engineer- Platform

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

Senior Staff Software Engineer - Platform

We are looking for a talented Engineering Lead with experience in building and managing secure authentication and authorization systems. In this role, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining scalable authorization management systems, ensuring the security of user data, and enabling seamless user experiences. You will collaborate closely with product, security, and engineering teams to integrate robust authorization mechanisms into our platform

Here’s what you’ll do day to day:

• Platform Engineering: Design and implement scalable and reliable platform solutions to support Gusto’s product suite. This includes engineering robust backend systems that scale efficiently, integrating technologies like GraphQL, Sidekiq, and Kafka to optimize data handling, background job processing, and event-driven workflows.
• Operational Excellence: Drive operational excellence by ensuring that the platform is highly available, reliable, and performs well in production environments. Focus on building automated monitoring, incident response, and performance optimization processes to ensure systems run smoothly.
• Hands-on Coding & Development: Contribute directly to the codebase, primarily using Ruby on Rails and GraphQL, ensuring high-quality, maintainable code while supporting the performance and reliability of Gusto’s platform.
• Code Quality & Reviews: Actively participate in code reviews, providing clear and constructive feedback to maintain high engineering standards, and ensuring the team’s code quality continues to improve over time.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate closely with Product Management, Design, Security and Business teams to identify platform requirements, develop innovative solutions, and ensure seamless integration with other product components.
• Platform Performance & Scalability: Focus on optimizing platform performance, working on improving load balancing, caching strategies, and database performance to ensure the platform can scale with increasing traffic and customer demands.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Mentor junior engineers, helping them solve technical challenges, pair programming as needed and growing careers of team members. Take the lead on complex projects, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery of platform solutions.
• Rapid Prototyping & Feature Launches: Prototype, iterate, and deploy new platform features quickly, contributing to an agile development process that brings value to customers faster.
• Foster a Collaborative Environment: Build a collaborative team culture that encourages creativity and innovation, ensuring a positive environment that enables engineers to thrive.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Experience: 12+ years of software development experience, with a strong focus on platform engineering and expertise in Ruby on Rails.
• Technical Expertise: Solid understanding of platform engineering, including system design, performance optimization, and scaling backend systems. Strong experience in backend technologies and tools, especially Ruby on Rails.
• Operational Excellence: Experience in building and maintaining highly available and reliable systems, with a focus on operational excellence. This includes automated monitoring, incident response, performance optimization, and ensuring system health in production environments.
• API Design & Integration: Experience in designing and integrating APIs, ensuring smooth communication between different components of a platform while maintaining system integrity and performance.
• Tools & Frameworks: Familiarity with tools and frameworks commonly used in platform engineering, such as Redis, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ, and other tech