Staff Software Engineer, Retirement AI

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 $187,000-$234,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $227,000-$284,000 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.