Staff Software Engineer, Solo

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 to help over 500,000 small businesses nationwide.

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.

About the Role

Gusto Solo is the all-in-one platform solopreneurs (and their accountants) run their whole business on. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help build the next chapter of Solo. You'll work in a tight, high-leverage funnel where your work maps directly to top-line revenue, and you'll help build an AI-native product.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of net-new product areas, from technical design through shipping.
• Use AI as a genuine multiplier in your workflow and help build AI-native experiences into the product itself (including MCP tools).
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and GTM to identify customer and business problems, prototype solutions, and iterate quickly.
• Make pragmatic architecture and data-modeling decisions for greenfield challenges.
• Build and maintain full-stack features—from backend APIs to frontend UI—with an eye toward scalability and maintainability.
• Weigh in on product framing, design tradeoffs, and GTM considerations.
• Help define engineering practices and technical foundations for the team.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping full-stack features end to end.
• Proficiency across a full-stack toolkit (e.g., Ruby on Rails, React, TypeScript, GraphQL) and the judgment to choose the right tool for the problem.
• Demonstrated ownership of 0→1 or greenfield projects.
• A self-driven mindset comfortable setting direction amid ambiguity.
• Habitual use of AI tools in day-to-day engineering work.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with strong cross-functional partnership skills.
• Ability to travel to a Gusto office for a two-day onboarding.

Bonus Points

• Experience building for self-employed businesses or SMBs.
• Experience in a regulated or compliance-adjacent domain (fintech, payroll, tax, accounting).
• Experience shipping AI-powered or AI-augmented product experiences (agents, copilots, LLM-based tooling).
• Startup or "team of one" experience operating with high autonomy.