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, supporting over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. They are hiring a Staff Backend Software Engineer for their Product & AI Security Engineering team to own and evolve the 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.
- 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).
- When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.
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