Sr Staff Frontend Engineer, Design Systems

About Gusto

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 Total Rewards philosophy. 

About the Role:

As a Sr Staff Engineer, you will be instrumental in defining the future of Gusto’s frontend experience, shaping how our product is built and interacted with by hundreds of thousands of small business owners. This role offers a unique opportunity to operate at a high level of technical influence, driving major advancements in our core design system architecture, tooling, and practices, including the strategic integration of AI. If you are passionate about maximizing developer efficiency, ensuring world-class accessibility, and tackling ambiguous, high-impact challenges across a large engineering organization, this is your chance to lead and innovate. 

About the Team:

The Design Systems team’s primary goal is to empower internal teams to build high-quality and cohesive UI/UX with as much efficiency as possible. We both own the reusable components, and are also responsible for much of the frontend expertise across all of Gusto including accessibility, frontend code quality, and education. Increasingly, our team is also investing in tooling to assist both designers and engineers with the creation of UI for guidance, prototyping, demos, and production ready code.

This is a great time to join to help define the direction for the team as we tackle what new challenges and opportunities AI presents for design systems and frontend as a whole!

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Partner with designers to build and maintain a system of reusable components and documentation that empowers all of Gusto using – but not limited to – Javascript/Typescript, React, CSS/Sass, and HTML
• Write docs to enable self-serve education of our consumers
• Develop tools to ensure that the quality, performance, and accessibility of Gusto’s reusable components continuously improve
• Develop tools to expand the pool of contributors and quality of contributions to Gusto’s frontend
• Coordinate across teams in building accessible, modular, performant frontend experiences
• Leverage AI to expand the scope and/or the quality of our design system and Gusto’s frontend

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of technical experience in a frontend engineering role
• Highly proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, TypeScript
• Strong history of cross-functional collaboration with Design and/or other non-technical teams
• Experience in building UI components that are modular, composable, flexible, maintainable, and well-documented
• Experience with a JavaScript testing library for unit, integration, and end-to-end validation
• Appreciation for a collaborative, test-driven environment
• Experience turning wireframes and mockups into responsive, accessible, tested code
• Passionate about creating inclusive, accessible experiences for everyone
• Familiar with emerging trends in frontend development, including the various approaches to styling (CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, Sass, etc.), component libraries (Material UI, Carbon, Polaris, and Lightning), accessibility tooling (axe), observability (RUM, Synthetic Testing), and AI (MCPs, prompting, etc.)

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $225,000/yr to $275,000/yr for San Francisco, CA. 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.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. 

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto. 

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.