Principal Software Engineer - Contractors Payroll

15+ years of professional software development experience.

Experience as a tech lead, overseeing and successfully delivering projects that span multiple teams.

Enthusiasm for a collaborative, test-driven development environment.

Proven experience building and maintaining resilient backend systems that support customer-facing products, including optimizing existing systems for performance, reliability, and scalability.

Ability to produce maintainable, structured, and well-documented code.

Expertise in developing and maintaining RESTful APIs, GraphQL endpoints, and backend services, ensuring seamless integration with frontend systems and third-party services.

As the Principal Engineer for the Contractors team, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Gusto’s flagship Payroll product—one of the core pillars of our platform. You will design, build, and scale the capabilities that power essential experiences for our customers. Working collaboratively with product managers, designers, and other engineers, you will deliver impactful features that meet customer needs and elevate user experiences.

As a Gusto Engineer at this level, you’ll guide projects end-to-end—shaping initial feature specifications, driving architectural decisions to bring systems closer to their desired end states, executing on complex initiatives, and maintaining code that powers mission-critical functionality. Beyond technical contributions, you’ll help define and contribute to the broader strategy of how Gusto continues to build and scale its Payroll product.

If you’re excited about solving complex, high-impact problems and want to contribute to a product that touches the lives of millions, we’d love to have you on board!

Architect, build, and maintain scalable, secure, and resilient backend systems to support Gusto’s Payroll products.

Function as a Technical Lead across multiple teams in Pay Group, helping us keep engineers unblocked and deliver high-quality work supporting our long-term goals.

Payroll serves as Gusto's core product, used by each of our 300,000+ customers and contributing significantly to our annual recurring revenue of over $500,000,000. Although we hold the

leading market position for SMBs in the US

, the market remains highly fragmented, with an estimated 90% still in need of a superior solution.

The Contractors team empowers businesses to onboard and pay contractors in 120+ countries with ease and speed. This includes critical functionalities such as payroll setup, preparation, and submission, historical reporting, time tracking, and shift scheduling. As a key member of this team, you’ll have the opportunity to make a profound impact on both the product and the customers who depend on it daily.