Senior Software Engineer, Product & AI Security

<div class="content-intro"><p style="line-height: 1.2;"> </p> <hr> <p><strong>About Gusto</strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our </span><a href="https://gusto.com/about/careers/total-rewards"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Total Rewards philosophy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></p></div><p><strong>About the Role:</strong></p> <p>We’re hiring two Senior Software Engineers for our Product AI Security Engineering team. You’ll own and evolve the security foundations behind Gusto’s products and AI/LLM experiences, from authentication and authorization at scale to securing core services and data. You’ll partner across the company to solve high-impact security problems and ship secure, reliable, AI-powered features quickly and safely.</p> <p><strong>About the Team:</strong></p> <p>The Product AI Security Engineering team sits at the intersection of product, platform, and AI at Gusto. We prioritize high‑leverage projects that reduce risk, harden our foundations, and unlock faster delivery for other teams. We build security tools and services, embed with partner teams when needed, and set best practices for authentication, authorization, and safe data handling, especially as we adopt AI and LLMs.</p> <p><strong>Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design, build, and operate <strong>authentication and authorization</strong> systems that work at Gusto scale.</li> <li>Strengthen <strong>core services and data protections</strong>, including access control, storage, and APIs.</li> <li>Detect and mitigate <strong>account takeover and other abuse</strong>, improving safety for our customers.</li> <li>Build <strong>security platforms and tooling</strong> that help product and AI teams move quickly and safely.</li> <li>Own and improve <strong>high-availability security and identity services</strong> that other teams depend on.</li> <li>Tackle <strong>ambiguous AI/LLM security problems</strong> from threat modeling to practical mitigations.</li> <li>Provide leadership in promoting security and software engineering excellence.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Here’s what we're looking for:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>7+ years of experience</strong> as a <strong>backend engineer</strong>, building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs </li> <li>Deep experience with <strong>authentication and authorization</strong>, such as SAML/SSO, RBAC, and ABAC.</li> <li>Proven track record building <strong>secure, highly available distributed systems and services</strong>.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with modern <strong>security tooling and practices</strong> (e.g., SAST, DAST, SIEM, SCA).</li> <li>Proficiency in one or more of: <strong>Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript</strong> </li> <li>Experience with AI tools for coding (ex: Cloud Code, Cursor, Github Copilot) </li> <li>Bonus: experience with <strong>authorization platforms/policy engines</strong> (e.g., Open Policy Agent, SpiceDB) and technologies like <strong>GraphQL, gRPC, Kubernetes, Terraform, Traefik, Flask, Okta</strong>.</li> <li>Strong collaboration skills and comfort breaking down <strong>complex, cross‑cutting security and AI problems</strong> into clear, practical solutions.</li> </ul> <p>Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $186,000-210,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area. 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.</p><div class="content-conclusion"><hr> <p><span ... (truncated, view full listing at source)