Staff Software Engineer, PEO Benefits
Gusto, Inc. · Denver
$163,000–$247,000from the description
Jul 15, 2026
Denver
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level full-stack engineering role on a newly formed team building benefits infrastructure for a Professional Employer Organization product. Day-to-day work spans benefits shopping flows, carrier integrations, and AI-assisted automation tools, all on a large Ruby on Rails and React codebase. The role suits an experienced engineer comfortable making foundational architectural decisions, leading cross-functional projects, and mentoring peers.
Staff level · 8+ years · Remote · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 46,400 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 27,800–69,500
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The compensation range spans two tiers: $163,000–$204,000 for Denver and most remote locations, and $197,000–$247,000 for San Francisco and New York. The min/max here reflect the full cross-geography range.
Ruby on Rails is listed under an 'Others' section framed as 'experience in, or interest working in' — clearly optional/preferred rather than a hard gate.
React and JavaScript are referenced in the context of scaling 'one of the largest Ruby/Rails and Javascript/React applications in the world' — this is stack description rather than an explicit required-skills section. However, the day-to-day responsibilities explicitly call out 'writing clean frontend code' and the stack is React/JS, making these reasonable hard gates for a full-stack role at this level.
AI tools/frameworks are called out in the requirements section with firm language ('Experience leveraging AI tools or systems'), making them a hard gate; the follow-on 'Curiosity and experimentation with emerging AI frameworks' is softer but in the same block.
PEO domain experience (3+ years) is explicitly marked 'Preferred' in the posting and is not emitted as a named technology skill.
No specific backend API framework or database technology is named beyond Ruby on Rails; no cloud platform is mentioned.
This posting reads as a fully-remote role, so it was scored against the national candidate pool rather than a single metro.
Read the full posting
The employer publishes the full description on their own site — read it there ↗. Or sign in to read it here — it's free, and it also lets you track this application.