Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, handling payroll, health insurance, and HR so owners can focus on their craft. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Product & AI Security Engineering team to own and evolve security foundations behind Gusto's products and AI experiences.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate authentication and authorization systems that work at Gusto scale
• Strengthen core services and data protections, including access control, storage, and APIs
• Detect and mitigate account takeover and other abuse, improving safety for our customers
• Build security platforms and tooling that help product and AI teams move quickly and safely
• Own and improve high-availability security and identity services that other teams depend on
• Tackle ambiguous AI/LLM security problems from threat modeling to practical mitigations
• Provide leadership in promoting security and software engineering excellence

Skills

• 10+ years of experience as a backend engineer, building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs
• Proven track record building secure, highly available distributed systems and services
• Hands-on experience with modern security tooling and practices (e.g., SAST, DAST, SIEM, SCA)
• Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript
• Experience with AI tools for coding (ex: Cloud Code, Cursor, Github Copilot)
• Strong collaboration skills and comfort breaking down complex, cross‑cutting security and AI problems into clear, practical solutions
• Strong backend software engineering skills — you write clean, scalable, well-tested code
• Experience building and operating high-availability services at scale
• Ability to partner cross-functionally and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly
• Genuine interest and desire to grow within the security domain — you don't need to have worked in security before, but you're excited to get started
• Experience with authorization platforms/policy engines (e.g., Open Policy Agent, SpiceDB) and technologies like GraphQL, gRPC, Kubernetes, Terraform, Traefik, Flask, Okta
• Experience with authentication and authorization, such as SAML/SSO, RBAC, and ABAC
• Familiarity with security concepts like access control, abuse detection, or data protection
• Prior work on security tooling or platforms

Benefits

• All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success.
• Stock equity is additional.
• 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 a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.

Company Overview

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