Senior Software Engineer, Risk

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

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. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role:

We're hiring engineers to join our Risk Engineering team, which works on core platform capabilities, improves our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and builds the future of Gusto's Risk system. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll lead well-scoped — and sometimes technically or organizationally complex projects end-to-end: driving technical design, partnering with product, design, and data teams to plan and deliver, and writing the code that powers core experiences. You'll be a domain expert other engineers turn to, and you'll set the technical example for your team. If you're interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team:

In order to enable growth for Gusto and our customers, the Risk org is responsible for defining best-in-class user experiences in order to mitigate financial and reputation risk. This team within our Risk Org is responsible for building the infrastructure for a.) bad actor platform capabilities to prevent fraudsters from abusing Gusto's platform while improving false positive rate and, b.) the credit underwriting and collections platform to enable faster and greater access to credit while minimizing financial loss.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, build, and test infrastructure capabilities that enable the Risk team to efficiently build unique, custom-tailored experiences for existing and emerging Risk products

• Lead well-scoped, sometimes complex projects end-to-end from technical design through rollout partnering with Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, and Operations

• Help scale one of the largest Ruby/Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world

• Serve as a domain expert other engineers consult on for Risk platform capabilities

• Set expectations with stakeholders on project timelines, communicating updates and changes as the project progresses

• Mentor engineers earlier in their careers and contribute to a healthy, high-performing team

• Identify and execute on technical debt and quality improvements within your project's domain

• Participate in an on-call rotation, respond to reliability, security, and performance incidents, and prioritize postmortem action items

• Improve the productivity and happiness of your team with the tools, patterns, and documentation you build

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years of Software Develop Experience

• Experience applying AI tools to accelerate development, testing, and documentation and directing, reviewing, and correcting AI-generated work based on your own understanding of the system

• Experience designing, building, and testing production-quality code and architecture for projects that may be technically or organizationally complex

• Experience owning a project end-to-end from technical design through rollout while coordinating with product, design, and data partners

• Comfortable setting technical direction for a project and making tradeoffs between competing priorities (e.g. customer needs vs. technical needs, short-term vs. long-term)

• An aptitude and interest in bringing clarity and simplicity to complex and ambiguous problems

• Ability to communicate technical complexity and help facilitate informed tradeoffs

• Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven environment

• Able to build maintainable, structured, well-documented code

• Experience building fault-tolerant, reliable software

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $150,000-$170,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $185,000-$205,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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