Senior Software Engineer, Security & AI Platform

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Gusto

Compensation

$186,000 - 222,000

San Francisco, CA

Hybrid

Posted April 3, 2026

Job Description

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

About the Role:

We're hiring two Senior Software Engineers for our Product & AI Security Engineering team. You'll own and evolve the security foundations behind Gusto's products and AI/LLM experiences—securing core services, data, and AI-powered features. You'll partner across the company to solve high-impact problems and ship reliable, secure features quickly and safely. No prior security domain experience required—we're looking for strong backend engineers who are excited to grow into this space.

About the Team:

The Product & AI Security Engineering team sits at the intersection of product, platform, and AI at Gusto. We prioritize high‑leverage projects that reduce risk, harden our foundations, and unlock faster delivery for other teams. We build security tools and services, embed with partner teams when needed, and set best practices for authentication, authorization, and safe data handling—especially as we adopt AI and LLMs.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

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 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.
Collaborate on authentication and authorization systems as you grow your security expertise.

Here’s what we're looking for:

7+ years of experience as a backend engineer, building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs
Proven track record building highly available distributed systems and services.
Genuine curiosity and desire to work within the security domain, you don't need to have done it before, but you're excited to dive in
Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript
Experience with AI tools for coding (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot)
Strong collaboration skills and comfort breaking down complex, cross‑cutting problems into clear, practical solutions

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $186,000-222,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area. 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.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. 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). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come f

pythonjavatypescriptjavascriptgoaibackendiosdataproduct