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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