Software Engineering Manager, Payroll Delivery

About the Role:

The Payroll Delivery Engineering People Engineering (PE) leader plays a pivotal role in advancing Gusto’s mission — ensuring every employee is paid accurately, on time, and in full compliance with thousands of regulations. As Gusto continues to scale, Payroll Delivery is evolving from a set of product workflows into a resilient, high-scale financial platform that powers every payment made through Gusto and its partners.

As the PE for Payroll Delivery, you’ll lead and empower a team of engineers responsible for the systems that keep Gusto’s payroll engine running seamlessly. You’ll partner with engineering, product, and operations leaders across Pay Group to shape the vision, strategy, and execution for one of Gusto’s most critical domains. This role blends hands-on technical leadership, systems architecture, and people development. You’ll modernize legacy systems, improve reliability and scalability, and enable the next generation of payroll experiences. You’ll create an environment where engineers thrive, bring clarity to complex challenges, and ensure the team delivers with both speed and excellence. This is a rare opportunity to lead at the center of Gusto’s mission — building the foundation that ensures millions of employees get paid correctly, while defining how Gusto delivers payroll at scale.

About the Team:

The Payroll Delivery team sits at the core of Gusto’s Pay Group organization, powering the movement of billions of dollars in payroll payments every month. Our systems handle payment calculations, funding flows, and compliance logic that span thousands of jurisdictions and multiple product surfaces. The team collaborates closely with partners across Tax, Time, and Contractor Payments to ensure seamless, compliant, and scalable payroll experiences.

The work is both deeply technical and deeply impactful, requiring precision, foresight, and empathy. You’ll join a collaborative, values-driven group of engineers, product managers, designers, and operations experts who are passionate about simplifying complex financial systems. Together, we’re building the next generation of payroll delivery — scalable, reliable, and designed for the future of work.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for Gusto’s core payroll delivery systems, fostering a culture of ownership, inclusion, and high performance.
• Define and execute the technical vision for payroll delivery, ensuring scalability, resilience, and accuracy across high-volume financial workflows.
• Modernize legacy systems while maintaining reliability for millions of payroll transactions.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Operations leaders to align on priorities and ensure technical decisions balance speed, compliance, and long-term maintainability.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple domains and lead architectural strategy for distributed systems that handle complex data and regulatory requirements.
• Improve system observability, incident response, and operational excellence through automation and thoughtful design.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, technical discussions, and feedback while promoting best practices in testing, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate across the organization to align engineering practices, drive clarity, and shape Gusto’s long-term payroll platform strategy.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including leading technically complex initiatives across multiple teams and systems.
• 4+ years of full-time experience as an Engineering PE, managing and developing product engineering team(s).
• Proven track record of designing, building, and maintaining mission-critical, high-volume transactional systems, ideally within payroll, tax, or financial domains.
• Deep experience designing APIs, data models, and distributed systems that perform reliably at scale.
• Experience driving multi-quarter technical strategy, coordinating dependencies across teams, and influencing product roadmaps through strong technical insight.
• Demonstrated success improving system observability, incident response, and operational excellence through automation and design.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to align engineers, PMs, and operational partners around complex technical trade-offs.
• Proven ability to build and sustain high-performing teams that deliver meaningful impact and foster trust, accountability, and long-term success.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity, simplifying complexity, and driving clarity in evolving technical landscapes.
• Bonus experience includes modernizing legacy systems, introducing automation or AI into business processes, or working within regulated financial or fintech environments.
• Strategic systems thinker who connects product goals, architecture evolution, and operational excellence.
• First-principled and practical leader who balances constraints and drives effective solutions.
• Execution-oriented technical expert who blends technical depth with delivery discipline.
• Architect for resilience and scale, ensuring reliability and maintainability in high-volume systems.
• Cross-functional influencer who aligns diverse stakeholders and unifies long-term strategy.
• Engineering excellence advocate who elevates craftsmanship, documentation, and testing standards.
• Product-minded engineer who focuses on customer value and business impact.
• Calm, pragmatic problem solver who leads with focus, optimism, and clarity through complexity.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $163,000/yr to $204,000/yr in Denver (plus most remote locations), and $198,000/yr to $247,000/yr for San Francisco & New York. Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.