Principal Software Engineer - Pay Group Engineering

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.

Location: Only SF, Denver, NYC

About the Role:

We’re hiring seasoned engineers to join our teams that work on core platform capabilities, improving our existing systems for extensibility and scalability, and building the future of Gusto's Payroll and Tax systems. As a Gusto Software Engineer at this level, you’ll be guiding projects end-to-end by influencing initial feature specs, understanding how to take existing systems closer to desired end states, executing on projects, and maintaining code that powers core experiences. If you’re interested in building elegant software with far-reaching effects in our modern economy, join us!

About the Team:

Payroll is the beating heart of Gusto’s business. Pay Group (payroll and tax) teams are responsible for the product, ops, and service components Gusto uses to onboard customers, process payrolls, calculate taxes and deductions, pay and file with tax agencies, and maintain compliance on behalf of the customers. The domain is highly complex and offers the opportunity to engage in system design that simplifies this for customers, both internal and external.

Sub- Teams:

• Tax Accuracy: The Tax Accuracy group is responsible for gathering and maintaining the necessary information for us to pay and file taxes accurately and on time for our customers, and consists of multiple teams that cover various parts of the process.
• Ledger: This team is building a payroll ledger to track accrual accounting for payroll-related money movement. This team is starting to support the payroll domain, risk, payments, and accounting.
• Engine: This team works closely with the payroll compliance team to ensure enablement of compliant pay, such as minimum wage adjustments, regular rate of pay, etc. We enable end-to-end success of payroll processing and working with various domain teams such as tax calculations, tax setup, payments, and more.
• Platform: This team is developing a new platform to be the common interface for interacting with payroll and