Senior Staff Engineer, Expansion Experiences

About Gusto

Gusto provides payroll, health insurance, 401(k), and HR services to more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

Role

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on Expansion Experiences, own outcomes across the expansion funnel—from identifying customer needs to the ongoing value of adopted products. Build recommendations, nurture journeys, and self-service conversion paths that complement Sales support and drive retained and expansion revenue.

Responsibilities

• Own outcomes across the full expansion funnel rather than a single feature or surface.
• Shape technical architecture for recommendations and conversion journeys, creating foundations for future initiatives.
• Scope work within time constraints, ship simple versions that test ideas, and iterate on results.
• Design experiments and interpret ambiguous or noisy data to decide what to scale or stop.
• Partner independently with Product, Design, and Data Science to shape the roadmap.
• Anticipate technical investments and identify technical or product opportunities before being asked.
• Provide pragmatic technical direction, conduct strong code reviews, mentor engineers, and delegate well-scoped work.

Qualifications

• Successful applicants typically have 10+ years of software development experience, including shipping full-stack, customer-facing products at scale.
• Product-minded approach grounded in customer problems and meaningful metrics, with independence across product, design, and data partnerships.
• Experience in growth, lifecycle, or conversion contexts—such as onboarding, upselling, personalization, or recommendations—is ideal; demonstrated ability to think in these terms is also accepted.
• Demonstrated ability to ship quickly with high quality, measure results, and iterate.
• Experience owning multi-quarter initiatives from concept through measurable business impact.
• Comfort with ambiguity and leading peers through influence rather than formal authority.
• Experience with large-scale refactoring, performance and reliability improvements, and technical ownership.
• Track record of mentoring engineers, scaling team impact, and delegating scoped work.
• Experience using AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver product capabilities.
• Ability to write structured, maintainable, well-documented code.
• Effective communication across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Experience with, or interest in working with, Ruby on Rails, React, GraphQL, and TypeScript.

Work Arrangement and Application Requirements

• Hybrid role in San Francisco, with designated office attendance approximately 2–3 days per week or more depending on the role. San Francisco office expectations also cover the San Jose metro area.
• Travel to a Gusto office for onboarding is required; discuss questions with your recruiter.
• A secure, reliable, consistent internet connection is required when working outside an office, including hybrid non-office days.
• Regular, predictable attendance and timely responsiveness are expected.
• All team members are expected to engage with relevant AI tools and develop their fluency. Role-specific AI experience is assessed during interviews.

Compensation and Benefits

• Target cash compensation: 225,000–275,000 for San Francisco and New York; 191,000–240,000 for Denver and most remote locations.
• Stock equity is additional. Final offers depend on experience, expertise, role, level, location, and other factors and may differ from listed amounts.
• Posting compensation metadata separately lists Start of Entry: 206,315; Midpoint: 245,000; Max of Mature: 283,683; Variable Pay Target: 10.
• Full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and restricted stock units (RSUs).