{"id":58711,"url":"https://alion.io/job/gusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist","title":"Staff Software Engineer, Gustie Assist","company":{"id":783,"name":"Gusto","domain":"gusto.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/gusto","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":82,"open_postings":23,"ghost_share":0.043,"stale_share":0.565,"repost_share":0.087,"time_to_fill_p50_days":46,"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Denver, United States","New York, United States","San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":164000,"max_usd":306000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1500},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"GraphQL","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby on Rails","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-14T18:28:25Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-12","last_verified_at":"2026-10-28T03:43:13Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":74,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":74},"description":"About Gusto\nAt 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.\nAll 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.\nAI 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.\nGustie Assist builds Otto, the AI agent that Gusto's support advocates rely on to solve customers' hardest payroll, benefits, and compliance problems. When a small business hits a wall and reaches out, the advocate turns to Otto: it reasons over the customer's full context, answers in the moment, and increasingly takes real actions across Gusto's systems on the advocate's behalf to make the customer whole. We're a small platform team building an agent that reasons, acts, and has to get it right when the stakes are someone's payroll.\nThis is unusually broad, hands-on applied-AI work: you'll own an LLM agent runtime and the full stack around it, including the tool layer that lets it act over Gusto's systems, the Rails/GraphQL backend, the advocate-facing frontend, and the eval system that keeps it trustworthy while it touches live customer accounts. We keep the path from idea to production short, and measure ourselves on customer outcomes, not model novelty.\nHere's what you'll do day-to-day:\nDesign and build across the Otto platform, including the runtime and agent graph, the tool/action layer, the Rails/GraphQL backend, and the advocate-facing experience, owning a meaningful slice end-to-end\nExpand what the agent can safely do: autonomous, tool-using actions with human-in-the-loop approval, built on a secure, auditable identity and permissions model\nBuild the eval and observability systems (LLM-as-judge + deterministic scorers, offline gates and online production monitoring) that let us change the agent in production weekly without regressing correctness or escalation behavior\nWork directly with LLMs, including prompting, tool/function design, retrieval, and the feedback loops that turn real advocate interactions into a better Otto\nPartner closely with Product, Data, Design, and our CX teams to turn advocate and customer pain into shipped capabilities\nMentor engineers and set the bar for how we build agentic systems responsibly and at scale\nHere's what we're looking for:\nTypically 8+ years of software engineering experience, owning systems end-to-end\nYou've built and shipped LLM-powered or agentic systems in production, including tool-calling/agents, retrieval, or evals, and you know where they break and how to make them reliable\nStrong full-stack range. Must be comfortable moving between backend services, an LLM runtime, and customer-facing product, and picking up whatever the problem needs\nExperience owning multi-quarter projects that make measurable user impact at scale\nSound judgment about safety and blast radius when software takes real actions on real accounts\nAbility to mentor engineers and raise the bar around you\nAlso great to have:\nExperience with agent frameworks, evals/LLM-as-judge, retrieval, or MCP-style tool architectures\nExperience with Ruby on Rails and/or JavaScript/React (our stack), or the ability to ramp quickly\nFamiliarity with GraphQL and federated backends\nAppreciation for a collaborative, test-driven, high-autonomy environment, and clear communication with engineering and business stakeholders\nAt 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.\nGusto 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.\nNote: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. \nWhen 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.\nReliable, consistent presence: We expect regular and predictable attendance, whether you're working in-office, hybrid, or fully remote, so that you stay closely connected to your team, customers, and stakeholders in real time and ensure colleagues and customers receive the timely support and responsiveness they deserve.\nOur customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto. \nGusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.\nGusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.\nPersonal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7152,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Health insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Payroll Services","HR & Payroll Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-14T18:28:25Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 56 · green card filings: 7","filings_12m":56,"filings_prev_12m":53,"green_card_filings_12m":7,"median_offered_wage_usd":203532,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":29}],"liveness":{"score":20,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.542,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":74,"expected_fill_days":46,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/gusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/gusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-28T07:44:33Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":9901,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-29T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":783},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=783"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fgusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fgusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fgusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/gusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fgusto-staff-software-engineer-gustie-assist"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":58711}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"gusto.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":58711},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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