Staff Software Engineer, Platform Orchestration

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:

Gusto's Platform Orchestration team is rebuilding how engineers ship at Gusto — turning operational toil into a product-grade self-service platform that AI agents can drive end-to-end. We sit at the intersection of Infrastructure Engineering, Developer Productivity, Security, and Product Engineering, and we enable self-service infrastructure capabilities through a Backstage-based Developer Portal and a Crossplane-based Platform Orchestrator. We automate as much as possible — safe rollouts of infrastructure and application changes, approval-based workflows, and the exposure of our entire toolchain to AI agents. We're embarking on a multi-year strategic effort to shift operational tasks into a product-driven platform so the broader Infrastructure group can focus on the future state of our systems.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design and implement an internal platform for engineers to build and deploy production-grade systems in a self-service manner
• Establish standards and build deterministic automation while optimizing for user accessibility and system reliability
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Developer Productivity, and Security teams to deliver capabilities that delight our internal users
• Build the AI-agent surface for our platform — MCPs, Claude skills, and structured tool catalogs that let agents drive infrastructure and deployment workflows safely on behalf of internal users
• Iterate on the internal-platform UX with the same product instincts you'd apply to a customer-facing product — measure adoption, listen for friction, and ship improvements
• Drive paved-road-vs-exception decisions: when to harden a self-service path, when to make a one-off accommodation, and when to redirect to a different supported workflow
• Participate in an on-call rotation supporting the deployment of platform services and the management of underlying infrastructure

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of experience with mode