Gusto

Senior Backend Engineer

Gusto$120K — $145K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Senior level or higher, with significant experience managing backend production systems.
  • Highly autonomous and collaborative, able to navigate ambiguity proactively.
  • Genuine builder and quick learner, focused on understanding technical implications.
  • AI-fluent, leveraging AI tools while maintaining critical judgment.
  • Comfortable working in distributed systems and microservices architectures.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate backend services within the microservices environment.
  • Own features from inception through to deployment and ongoing support.
  • Collaboratively make architecture choices while moving quickly.
  • Integrate with partner banks and service providers to ensure their success.
  • Embed reliability in workflows by expanding test coverage and analyzing CI/CD pipelines.

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment.
  • Opportunities for professional growth and skill enhancement.
  • Engagement in cutting-edge AI integration and continuous learning.
  • Contribution to a dynamic and fast-paced fintech space with significant impact.
Full Job Description
We're looking for a solutions-oriented senior+ backend engineer to take real ownership of meaningful parts of our software. This is an orchestrator's role: you'll design and implement your own work and ship services that move money reliably, scale cleanly, and hold up under the kind of scrutiny that comes with operating in the financial system.

Description

The role

You'll work across our microservices architecture, make architecture decisions alongside the rest of the team, and have a direct hand in what we build for partners. We don't hand down hyper-prescriptive tickets, but we don't expect you to guess, either. We need engineers who take a problem, actively design and iterate with Product, and ship robust solutions.
What you'll do
  • Design, build, and operate backend services across our microservices platform
  • Own features end to end: from shaping the approach with product and other engineers, through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, metrics, runbooks, and support.
  • Make architecture choices collaboratively: we move fast, but we talk through the decisions that are hard to reverse.
  • Integrate with partner banks, card networks, and third-party providers, and help our partners succeed on top of what you build.
  • Incorporate AI tools into your day-to-day workflow: planning, coding, testing, and technical documentation and help the team think critically about where AI assistance improves quality versus where it introduces risk.
  • Embed reliability into our daily workflow by continuously expanding test coverage and analyzing CI/CD pipelines to safeguard every rollout.
What we're looking for
  • Senior level or higher. You've owned significant backend systems in production and have the judgment that comes with it.
  • Highly autonomous, and a strong collaborator. You can run with ambiguity without going dark. You know when to pull someone in before a hard-to-reverse call, rather than disappearing into a prompt.
  • A genuine builder and fast learner. You ramp quickly on unfamiliar domains and you'd rather understand the why than just close the ticket.
  • AI-fluent, human-led. You get real leverage from AI tooling without handing over your judgment . You lead the model; you don't follow it.
  • Comfortable in a distributed systems / microservices world. APIs, asynchronous messaging, relational and non-relational data, and the failure modes that come with all of it.
  • US-based. Cincinnati or Boston is preferred, as is anywhere we already operate, but we'll talk to strong candidates anywhere in the continental US.
Bonus points

Bonus points if you know of the areas below as well!
  • AWS/EKS Experience
  • Experience with React/JS Frameworks
  • Experience in payments, banking, or fintech
Our stack

Our backend is primarily C# /.NET with Python in the mix, running as microservices on AWS and Kubernetes (EKS). We use PostgreSQL as our relational core and Cassandra for high-throughput transaction processing, with Redis, RabbitMQ, and Kafka moving data between services. Our frontend web applications run on React in an NX monorepo.

We ship through ArgoCD and GitHub Actions, lean hard on automated testing (PACT contract tests, xUnit, Cucumber/Jest, Playwright), and run observability on Grafana and OpenTelemetry with PagerDuty for alerting. We're PCI DSS v4.0 and SOC 2 certified, and security is a design requirement here, not an afterthought.
How we think about AI

We use AI tooling in every phase of engineering, but we use it skeptically. Very few PRs are opened without some correction & improvement from our engineers. We expect engineers to orchestrate with it for brainstorming, prototyping, boilerplate, and test generation: anything that lets you spend more of your time on the hard problems. At the same time, your peers are your most valuable collaborators. What we don't do is treat AI output as a finished product or a substitute for judgment. In fintech, correctness matters and money movements must be correct, a generated solution that's 95% right isn't good enough. We want engineers who know the difference, push back where AI missed the mark, and still find ways to ship faster because of the tools at their disposal. AI did it is never an excuse.

About Gusto

Gusto is a cloud-based human resources software platform that provides payroll, benefits, and HR management services to small businesses. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Gusto's platform automates many of the administrative tasks associated with HR, such as payroll processing, tax filings, and benefits administration. The company also offers a range of HR services, including compliance support, employee onboarding, and time tracking. Gusto is committed to helping small businesses succeed by providing them with the tools and resources they need to manage their HR operations more efficiently.
Learn more about Gusto
Size
1,000 employees
Industry
Founded
2012

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