Principal Software Engineer, State Tax Registration & Closure

Gusto, Inc. · Denver, CO - Hybrid; New York, NY - Hybrid; San Francisco, CA - Hybrid

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $239,000 – $264,000
  • Posted 2025-07-10
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

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 hiring a seasoned engineer to help stand up a newly formed team dedicated to State Tax Registration & Closure — the systems that get Gusto customers registered with state tax agencies when they start operating in a new state, and cleanly closed out when they stop. As a Principal Software Engineer, you'll shape this team's technical direction from the ground up: defining the architecture, evolving legacy registration and closure workflows toward a more scalable and automated future, and partnering closely with Compliance and Operations to keep customers in good standing across every state they touch.

This role starts focused: get State Tax Registration & Closure onto solid technical footing in the first year. From there, we expect your scope to grow — taking on broader technical influence across Company Group as you prove out the team's foundation. If you're excited about building elegant software with far-reaching effects in the modern economy, and about growing your impact alongside a newly forming team, we'd love for you to join us!

About the Team

Company Group builds the products that help small businesses become — and stay — legitimate, compliant companies, tackling the "back office" work that has everything to do with keeping a business in good standing. That spans forming a legal entity, registering and filing with state and local agencies, business insurance, and the ongoing compliance obligations that come with operating across multiple states.

Our Products

Business Compliance & Entity Management: Owns the products that help customers form and maintain their legal entity — filings, registered agent services, annual reports, and the ongoing paperwork that keeps a business in good legal standing.

Start Your Business: Helps first-time founders go from idea to registered, compliant business — entity formation, EIN setup, and the guidance new business owners need to get started with confidence.

Solo: Builds a back-office experience tailored to solo entrepreneurs and S-corp owners, simplifying the compliance and tax decisions that typically require an accountant.

Business Insurance: Owns the end-to-end business insurance experience, helping customers find and maintain the coverage (workers' comp, general liability, PEO) their state and industry require.

State Tax Registration & Closure (what you'll build): The future of how Gusto customers register for state payroll taxes as they expand into new states, and how those state tax accounts get cleanly closed out when a customer stops operating there. Multi-state registration and closure today is a maze of shifting agency requirements, inconsistent (and often paper-based) processes, and manual workarounds — the job here is to build AI-first, agentic automation that takes action on a customer's behalf (filling out and filing registration paperwork, following up with agencies, closing accounts) instead of routing everything through manual review, giving customers and Gusto's Compliance and Operations teams confidence at scale.

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

• Function as the founding Technical Lead for State Tax Registration & Closure, standing up the team's technical foundation and setting technical direction from day one.

• Design, build, and test the systems that register and close out Gusto customers' state tax accounts as they start and stop operating across all 50 states.

• Grow your remit over your first year — from building and scaling State Tax Registration & Closure to taking on broader technical influence across Company Group.

• Help scale one of the largest Ruby on Rails and TypeScript/React applications in the world.

• Collaborate on complex and ambiguous problems in partnership with Engineering, Product Management, Design, Data Science, Compliance, Operations, and other cross-functional teams.

• Mentor and support fellow engineers in creating holistic, scalable solutions.

• Drive the product development process from concept to launch, delivering products that make company compliance simple and easy.

• Bu

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