Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

About this role

About Gusto

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.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

About the Role:

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Cloud Infrastructure team, you'll build automation and evolve the foundational systems that support Gusto's products. This is a code-driven infrastructure role, well suited to someone with a DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering background who enjoys solving problems that help other engineers work more effectively. You'll help set the architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code patterns, and operational standards that every Gusto engineer builds on, with real autonomy over how it gets done. Key opportunities include migrating production applications into a modern AWS multi-account architecture, strengthening disaster recovery and compliance, and improving the speed and reliability of our infrastructure tooling.

About the Team:

Gusto's Cloud Infrastructure team builds and operates the AWS foundations that the rest of our engineering organization depends on. We manage infrastructure as code with Terraform/OpenTofu and run Spacelift, the platform hundreds of engineers use daily to deploy infrastructure changes. This experienced team partners with networking, compute, platform, and application teams to make Gusto's cloud infrastructure more reliable, resilient, and easier to use.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Build and maintain AWS infrastructure using Terraform/OpenTofu, with changes managed through code rather than manual configuration.

• Improve the speed, reliability, and usability of Spacelift workflows used by engineering teams across Gusto.

• Partner with application and infrastructure teams to migrate production services into a modern AWS multi-account architecture.

• Strengthen disaster recovery and compliance readiness by implementing and testing infrastructure resilience.

• Refactor infrastructure code into modular, reusable components that simplify maintenance and future development.

• Support engineering teams with cloud infrastructure needs, troubleshooting, and vendor integrations.

• Leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate infrastructure development, improve troubleshooting, and identify automation opportunities while maintaining a high bar for security, correctness, and reliability.

• Participate in an on-call rotation focused on internal engineering support, turning recurring issues into automation and lasting improvements.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering.

• Deep, production-level AWS expertise across compute, networking, identity, and security primitives.

• Demonstrated mastery of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/OpenTofu strongly preferred; Crossplane, CloudFormation, or similar) including module design, state management, and scalable patterns for large teams.

• Experience with multi-account AWS governance — AWS Organizations, OU design, SCPs/RCPs, and federated identity via IAM Identity Center or equivalent SSO.

• Hands-on experience with a managed IaC orchestration platform (Spacelift, Terraform Cloud, etc.).

• Experience operating production infrastructure for a customer-facing SaaS platform, including observability (monitoring, logging, alerting) and participating in incident response.

• Track record of driving multi-quarter infrastructure initiatives to completion with minimal direction.

Bonus:

• Operating Terraform/OpenTofu at large scale — managing thousands of workspaces or state files, module registries and versioning strategy, drift detection and remediation, and policy-as-code enforcement.

• Experience in compliance-regulated environments (SOC 2, PCI, NIST).

• Solid cloud networking foundations: VPC design, IP address management, DNS, egress control, and centralized traffic inspection.

Please note that travel to Gusto's office for onboarding is required for this position. If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please share with your recruiter.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at 163,000–204,000 in Denver, 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.

At Gusto, we don't use titles the traditional way, as a signal of rank or hierarchy. Instead, our titles describe two things at once — your craft (what you do, e.g. Engineering, Design) and your scope of ownership (what you're accountable for) — which is why you'll see something like "Head of X" instead of a rank word like "Director" that tells you neither. Because of this, the title on this posting may look different from what you'd expect based on the scope and seniority of the role, and from how similar roles are typically titled elsewhere. If you have questions about how this role compares to your current title or level, your recruiter can help translate.

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…