Staff Software Engineer, Tax Accounts

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join Tax Accounts — the team whose job is to make the complexity of dealing with hundreds of tax agencies disappear. As a Staff Software Engineer on Tax Accounts, you'll operate across the full product lifecycle: clean frontend code, reliable backend APIs and data models against a complex compliance domain, and automation that keeps hundreds of thousands of accounts in sync with tax agencies.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and test the systems behind employer and employee tax accounts: agency registrations, power-of-attorney / third-party authorizations, tax notices, agency filings, and state/federal/employee tax setup across jurisdictions.
• Build automation that requests and maintains access with tax agencies on the customer's behalf — bots, data exchanges, and agency-event pipelines.
• Model complex, jurisdiction-specific compliance rules into maintainable systems, owning reliability, performance, and correctness.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Tax Operations, and PEO teams to turn customer and compliance pain into solutions.
• Mentor other engineers and help the team solve difficult problems at large scale.
• Build products that customers love.

Requirements

• Significant software development experience, typically 8+ years, with demonstrated staff-level technical leadership.
• Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable customer impact at scale.
• Experience building scalable solutions that eliminate customer pain, with a strong sense of ownership over reliability, performance, and correctness.
• Comfort designing data models and APIs for a complex, rules-heavy domain (compliance, tax, payments, or similar).
• Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new capabilities, plus curiosity with emerging AI frameworks.
• Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact.
• Ability to communicate effectively across engineering teams and with business stakeholders.
• Ability to travel to Gusto's office for onboarding.

Nice to Have

• Experience in, or interest working in, Ruby on Rails.
• Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment.
• Ability to build well-structured, maintainable, well-documented code.