Senior Staff Software Engineer (Onboarding and Activation)

• As a Staff Product Engineer on Growth Onboarding, you’ll own the experience that turns curious signups into activated, thriving customers — taking friction out of getting started and meeting customers wherever they are, from the web to SMS, WhatsApp, and third-party AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude — working full-stack and cross-functionally as both a product builder and a founder
• Growth Onboarding owns one of the most consequential moments in a customer’s journey: their first experience of Gusto. We’re a full-stack, outcome-driven team measured by activation — not features shipped
• We move fast, ship prototypes over docs, and partner tightly with Product, Design, Data, and other engineering teams to make onboarding simpler, smarter, and a launchpad for everything a business does next
• You won’t just be handed a roadmap — you’ll help invent it, turning a bold AI product vision into new front doors and experiences that have never existed before
• If you want your work to move a top-line number and shape the front door to a company serving 500,000+ businesses, this is the team
• Own meaningful slices of the signup-to-activation experience end to end — from data model to UI — and ship measurable improvements to how quickly and reliably new customers get up and running
• Invent and prototype net-new, 0-to-1 experiences — bringing your own ideas for how AI can reimagine onboarding, not just implementing a spec handed to you
• Partner directly with Product, Design, and Data to frame problems, form hypotheses, and validate them with real customers in weeks, not quarters
• Identify where AI meaningfully removes customer effort (and where a simple form is better), and build those experiences thoughtfully into the flow
• Design onboarding as modular, reusable building blocks so new entry points into Gusto can be added quickly without rebuilding the foundation
• Raise the engineering bar through pragmatic technical direction, high-quality code, strong reviews, and mentoring engineers around you
• Make sharp scoping calls under a time box — shipping the simplest version that proves or disproves an idea, then iterating

Benefits

• Gender-affirming care and support
• Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
• A variety of mental health resources
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
• Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
• Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more- A track record of raising the bar for teams around you — through technical leadership, mentorship, and setting standards others follow
• A product-minded engineer who starts from the customer problem and the metric that matters, not just the ticket — and who can operate independently across product, design, and data partners
• Demonstrated ability to move fast and execute with high quality: someone who ships, measures, and iterates rather than waiting for perfect certainty
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping customer-facing products at scale
• Strong full-stack fundamentals and the versatility to work wherever the problem is (front end, back end, data)
• A founder mindset: high ownership, comfort with ambiguity and greenfield problems, and a bias toward action and outcomes over output
• Experience applying AI/LLM capabilities to real product problems — with the judgment to know where it adds value and where it adds noise — and a habit of using AI tools to work more effectively