About the Role
We’re hiring two Staff 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 define and own security architecture and standards across Gusto's products and AI/LLM experiences — setting the direction for authentication, authorization, and safe data handling, and building the platforms and guardrails that other teams rely on.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Design, build, and operate authentication and authorization systems that work at Gusto scale.
- Strengthen core services and data protections, including access control, storage, and APIs.
- Detect and mitigate account takeover and other abuse, improving safety for our customers.
- Build security platforms and tooling that help product and AI teams move quickly and safely.
- Own and improve high-availability security and identity services that other teams depend on.
- Tackle ambiguous AI/LLM security problems from threat modeling to practical mitigations.
- Provide leadership in promoting security and software engineering excellence.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- 10+ years of experience as a backend engineer, building and operating large-scale server-side services and APIs.
- Proven track record building secure, highly available distributed systems and services.
- Hands-on experience with modern security tooling and practices (e.g., SAST, DAST, SIEM, SCA).
- Proficiency in one or more of: Ruby, Python, Kotlin, JavaScript/TypeScript.
- Experience with AI tools for coding (ex: Cloud Code, Cursor, Github Copilot).
- Strong collaboration skills and comfort breaking down complex, cross‑cutting security and AI problems into clear, practical solutions.
Required:
- Strong backend software engineering skills — you write clean, scalable, well-tested code.
- Experience building and operating high-availability services at scale.
- Ability to partner cross-functionally and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly.
- Genuine interest and desire to grow within the security domain — you don't need to have worked in security before, but you're excited to get started.
Nice to have:
- Experience with authorization platforms/policy engines (e.g., Open Policy Agent, SpiceDB) and technologies like GraphQL, gRPC, Kubernetes, Terraform, Traefik, Flask, Okta.
- Experience with authentication and authorization, such as SAML/SSO, RBAC, and ABAC.
- Familiarity with security concepts like access control, abuse detection, or data protection.
- Prior work on security tooling or platforms.