Sr Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

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:

We're looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer to help evolve how Gusto stores and accesses data as the company scales. You'll help build a platform that lets engineering teams provision and access new datastores, evaluate and stand up highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems, and continue strengthening the resilience of the databases our product already depends on. This is a high-impact role shaping both the tools and the technology choices behind Gusto's storage layer.

About the Team:

The Datastores Infrastructure Engineering team designs, builds, and operates the data platforms that power Gusto's product: Kafka, MySQL, Postgres, and Redis. As Gusto grows, we're rethinking how the rest of engineering provisions and accesses storage — building self-service tooling for new datastores, exploring and adopting highly available, horizontally scalable systems, and continuing to reduce blast radius and improve the resilience of the databases we already operate.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day:

• Build the tooling and platform that let engineering teams provision and access new datastores, and evaluate and pilot highly available, horizontally scalable storage systems to meet Gusto's growing needs
• Take ownership of Kafka, from capacity planning and partitioning through performance tuning and reliability at scale, and help stand up and operate new non-relational datastores like DynamoDB
• Coordinate migrations and topology changes across the datastore platform (MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Kafka) with minimal disruption to production
• Drive efficiency and reliability improvements across the platform through query and consumer optimization, caching strategies, and workload management, backed by strong automation and standards for data consistency, integrity, and security
• Participate in on-call and drive long-term, sustainable reductions in operational burden
• Partner with product engineering teams to enable rapid, reliable product development, and share knowledge to grow the team's collective operating expertise

Here's what we're looking for:

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems, with deep hands-on expertise in streaming infrastructure (Kafka) and/or non-relational datastores (DynamoDB or similar) in production at scale
• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals—partitioning, replication, consistency models, and failure modes—and proven experience coordinating migrations or topology changes in production with minimal disruption
• Experience running production infrastructure in the cloud, including caching systems like Redis/ValKey and streaming platforms like Kafka, with a track record of driving infrastructure optimization at scale
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to simplify technical complexity and collaborate on technical direction across teams
• Curiosity and ability to operate in an AI-native environment, using AI tooling to drive improvements in query optimization, performance evaluation, and infrastructure automation
• Bonus: Experience with self-hosted distributed databases on Kubernetes (e.g., TiDB, CockroachDB, Vitess, or Citus), horizontal sharding, or service/vertical extraction from monolithic architectures
• Bonus: Experience working with Ruby on Rails or similar MVC frameworks at scale

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $183,000-$200,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $222,000-$245,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When 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.

Our 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.