Symmetry is the payroll infrastructure for software & payroll platforms powering the paychecks of over 64 million workers each year. Our fully integrated suite of payroll tax APIs and software tools allows companies to solve tax compliance issues and build applications across the entirety of the payroll process.
About the Role:
We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gusto’s Payroll Platform team, where you’ll build backend product infrastructure that powers payroll experiences across Gusto. This is a fully backend role focused on designing and evolving internal APIs and services used by other product teams to deliver accurate, compliant, and scalable payroll. You’ll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with other engineering teams, and help raise the bar on how payroll capabilities are built and consumed across the company.
About the Team:
The Payroll Platform team builds the foundational services that make payroll possible at Gusto. Our customers are internal product teams building payroll, time, contractor, and accountant experiences, as well as external partners through Gusto Embedded Payroll. We focus on creating reliable, performant, and well-designed APIs that abstract away payroll complexity and enable teams to move faster with confidence. Our work sits at the intersection of backend product engineering, developer experience, and large-scale systems in a highly regulated domain.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs that support core payroll workflows and are consumed by multiple Gusto engineering teams
- Own a primary domain within the Payroll Platform, taking responsibility for system health, correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution
- Act as a technical partner to other engineering teams, collaborating closely to understand their needs, guide platform adoption, and co-design solutions that scale across use cases
- Author and drive architecture and design documents, contributing to technical direction while balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals
- Improve system performance, reliability, and observability as we scale payroll processing for hundreds of thousands of businesses
- Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver compliant and customer-impacting solutions
- Routinely leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality, and documentation, and help normalize and spread effective usage across the team.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
- Experience building and scaling internal platforms, shared services, or foundational APIs that support multiple product teams
- Proven ability to work independently on ambiguous problems, from understanding the business need through delivery and iteration
- Strong system design skills, including experience with performance optimization, scalability, and reliability in production systems
- Actively uses AI-assisted development tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) in daily engineering work and is comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible usage
- Experience collaborating across teams and acting as a technical partner in a product-focused engineering organization
- Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
Please note that travel to Gusto’s Denver office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000/yr to $204,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000/yr to $247,000/yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Symmetry has a physical office space in Scottsdale. 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).
When approved to work from a location other than the office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.
Working at SymmetryBeing happy at a job goes beyond just doing the work. Where you choose to spend 40 hours a week should be a place that challenges you professionally and aligns with your personal goals and well-being. We truly love what we do, and our customers love what we produce. Our family-owned and -operated business is collaborative, fun, and friendly. We offer the opportunity to work with all kinds of positions across the company, from the CEO to support to sales and everything in between.
Recently, Symmetry became part of Gusto. More than 400,000 businesses use Gusto’s people platform to hire, pay, insure, and support their team–from modern payroll and benefits to distributed work services and international contractor support to expert HR. Together, Symmetry and Gusto are pushing the entire industry forward by helping growing businesses access tools and services that for so long have only been available to larger corporations.
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 with us.
We are 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. Our company considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Our company 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.
We take security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.
Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.
About our productsOur products make sure millions of paychecks are right, no matter where people live or work in the U.S. We simplify the payroll process with accurate and dependable payroll withholding tax solutions. Our clients include Fortune 500 companies, like Walmart and Southwest Airlines, and leading payroll service providers, including ADP and Paychex. With a 95%+ customer retention rate, our products always have to be top-of-the-line, and so do our employees.
Symmetry is also the company behind the popular website PaycheckCity.com, which helps millions of Americans better understand their paychecks every month.
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