Retirement AI Staff Engineer

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.

You’ll be a key engineer helping us ship real, user-facing AI at Gusto Retirement. This role is all about bias to action: owning problems end-to-end, getting working software in front of customers, and iterating quickly. You’ll work closely with a small, senior team to implement language-model-powered experiences. If you like being hands-on, making pragmatic technical decisions, working closely with product & design partners, and turning ideas into production features, you’ll be a great fit.

We’re a small, focused AI product team building practical, high-impact experiences to help people save for retirement at Gusto Retirement. The team is senior, collaborative, and very execution-focused—PMs bring strong ideas, and we own the execution fully. We work closely with product, design, and partner engineering teams, but keep tight ownership of our priorities and roadmap.

• →Design, build, and ship production features that use large language models to solve real customer problems.
• →Implement and integrate LLMs (prompting, tool loops, evaluation, monitoring, etc).
• →Make pragmatic architecture decisions, de-risk tricky areas, and keep the work unblocked.
• →Partner with product and design to refine ideas, shape scope, and iterate quickly on end-to-end experiences.
• →Collaborate with other engineering teams to integrate with existing systems and unblock dependencies.
• →Write clear, reliable, well-tested code that ships quickly and scales well.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience building and shipping production products or platforms
• Hands-on experience implementing LLM-powered features (e.g., RAG flows, agents, tool loops, workflow automation with language models, etc)
• Strong engineering skills (e.g., services, APIs, data flows); comfortable spending most of your time coding.
• Experience running or heavily contributing to a team’s execution: sprints, Jira, scoping, and cross-functional coordination.
• Bias to action: you default to trying things, iterating, and learning, rather than getting stuck in analysis or waiting for direction.
• Clear communicator who can work well with product, design, and other engineering teams without needing a formal management title.
• Experienced with Ruby on Rails (or any comparable language), React (or any comparable library).

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $164,000-$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $199,000-$247,000 for San Francisco & 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.