Staff Software Engineer, Payroll Canada

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.

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to join Gusto's Payroll Canada team, where you'll help build and scale the payroll experience for Canadian businesses. This is a 0-to-1 opportunity, meaning you'll be building core payroll capabilities for a new market largely from scratch, not just extending an established product. This is primarily a backend role which involves designing and evolving the services and business logic that power Canadian payroll with full-stack components where that logic surfaces to customers via GraphQL. You'll own complex technical problems end-to-end, partner closely with Product and Platform teams, and help bring Gusto's payroll product to a new country.

The Payroll Canada team is building Gusto's payroll product for the Canadian market, from internal (Gusto-on-Gusto) payroll to external customers running payroll for their own employees. We own the backend services and business logic that handle Canadian payroll calculations, compliance, and remittances, and we connect that logic to the frontend through GraphQL. Our work sits at the intersection of backend product engineering and a new, fast-moving market launch, in a highly regulated domain.

• →Design, build, and maintain backend services and business logic that power Canadian payroll — calculations, compliance, remittances, and related workflows - on Gusto’s Ruby on Rails platform
• →Connect backend logic to the frontend through well-designed GraphQL APIs, partnering with frontend engineers on the full user experience
• →Own a primary domain within Payroll Canada, taking responsibility for correctness, scalability, and long-term evolution as the product and customer base grow
• →Act as a technical partner across Product, Design, Data, Compliance, and Operations to deliver accurate, compliant, and customer-impacting solutions
• →Author and drive architecture and design documents, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform goals as we expand in Canada
• →Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate development, improve code quality and testing, and help normalize and spread effective AI usage across the team

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend development
• Comfortable venturing into full-stack work when needed, even if your primary strength is backend
• Experience applying AI tools (LLMs, Claude Code, Cursor) to accelerate development, improve code quality and build testing. Comfortable helping teams adopt effective, responsible AI-assisted development workflows.
• Experience working in large, complex codebases and a demonstrated ability to improve them incrementally without breaking things. Designing, building, and testing production level code that functions at scale. 
• Strong systems thinking and design skills, able to build mental models of unfamiliar systems, ask the right questions, and produce clear analysis others can act on, while designing for performance, scalability, and reliability in production.
• Experience collaborating across teams as a technical partner, communicating technical complexity clearly to product and design partners and helping the team navigate tradeoffs with full context
• Proficiency in one or more backend programming languages; experience with Ruby is strongly preferred but not required
• Interest in or experience with payroll, tax, or compliance domains a plus

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000–$204,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $197,000–$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.