Staff Software Engineer – Payments, Risk

Gusto

Staff Software Engineer developing full-stack payments and risk platforms at Gusto. Enabling money movement and financial risk system for small businesses.

Posted 4/16/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California, New York • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $163,000 - $204,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

JavaScriptReactRubyRuby on Rails

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design, build, and test Gusto core money movement or risk platform services – payment rails, ledgering, wallets, fraud, decisioning engine, KYC, AML, and compliance capabilities, among others
Mentor other engineers to help solve some of the hardest technical problems out there in very complex domains and at a large scale
Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world
Collaborate with our Product Engineering, Product Management, Data, Design, and financial operations teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch
Build platforms that engineering teams rely on, and trust to deliver products that our customers genuinely love

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years of software development experience
Passion for creating scalable, efficient money movement platforms for users
Experience leveraging AI tools or systems to accelerate development, improve testing, and deliver new platform capabilities
Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks, applying and sharing best practices to evaluate and scale AI use safely across teams
Experience owning multi-quarter projects that solve complex engineering problems and make measurable user impact at scale
Experience with large scale refactors, performance and reliability issues, and a strong sense of ownership over all aspects of your platform area
Ability to mentor engineers to maximize their performance and impact

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive base pay
Benefits
Equity (RSUs)

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

RubyRailsJavaScriptReactAI toolsKYCAMLpayment railsledgeringfraud detection

Soft Skills

mentoringproblem-solvingcollaborationcuriosityexperimentationownershipcommunicationiterationscalabilitycustomer focus