Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure

As a Staff Software Engineer on the Cloud Infrastructure team, you'll build automation and evolve the foundational systems that support Gusto's products. This is a code-driven infrastructure role, well suited to someone with a DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering background who enjoys solving problems that help other engineers work more effectively. You'll help set the architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code patterns, and operational standards that every Gusto engineer builds on, with real autonomy over how it gets done. Key opportunities include migrating production applications into a modern AWS multi-account architecture, strengthening disaster recovery and compliance, and improving the speed and reliability of our infrastructure tooling.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain AWS infrastructure using Terraform/OpenTofu, with changes managed through code rather than manual configuration; Improve the speed, reliability, and usability of Spacelift workflows used by engineering teams across Gusto; Partner with application and infrastructure teams to migrate production services into a modern AWS multi-account architecture; Strengthen disaster recovery and compliance readiness by implementing and testing infrastructure resilience; Refactor infrastructure code into modular, reusable components that simplify maintenance and future development; Support engineering teams with cloud infrastructure needs, troubleshooting, and vendor integrations; Leverage AI-assisted tools to accelerate infrastructure development, improve troubleshooting, and identify automation opportunities while maintaining a high bar for security, correctness, and reliability; Participate in an on-call rotation focused on internal engineering support, turning recurring issues into automation and lasting improvements; Help set the architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code patterns, and operational standards that every Gusto engineer builds on

Requirements

8+ years of hands-on experience in infrastructure, platform, or site reliability engineering; Deep, production-level AWS expertise across compute, networking, identity, and security primitives; Demonstrated mastery of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/OpenTofu strongly preferred; Crossplane, CloudFormation, or similar) including module design, state management, and scalable patterns for large teams; Experience with multi-account AWS governance (AWS Organizations, OU design, SCPs/RCPs, and federated identity via IAM Identity Center or equivalent SSO); Hands-on experience with a managed IaC orchestration platform (Spacelift, Terraform Cloud, etc.); Experience operating production infrastructure for a customer-facing SaaS platform, including observability (monitoring, logging, alerting) and participating in incident response; Track record of driving multi-quarter infrastructure initiatives to completion with minimal direction

Nice to have

Operating Terraform/OpenTofu at large scale (managing thousands of workspaces or state files, module registries and versioning strategy, drift detection and remediation, and policy-as-code enforcement); Experience in compliance-regulated environments (SOC 2, PCI, NIST); Solid cloud networking foundations (VPC design, IP address management, DNS, egress control, and centralized traffic inspection)

Benefits

Competitive base pay; benefits; equity (RSUs); Stock equity is additional to cash compensation