Staff Software Engineer, Observability
About Gusto At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff β payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR β so owners can focus on their craft and their customers.
What this role actually needs.
About Gusto At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff β payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR β so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. Responsibilities: - Shape the engineering organization standards around observability. - Own and evolve the observability platform, including distributed logging, metrics, and tracing infrastructure. - Build AI-native capabilities to automatically detect anomalies, diagnose failures, and accelerate root cause analysis. - Create powerful developer experiences through dashboards, notebooks, and interactive debugging tools. - Drive reliability automation with intelligent alerting, diagnostics, and incident response systems. - Partner across engineering teams to embed observability and reliability best practices. Requirements: - Strategic systems thinker who identifies high impact opportunities and builds scalable solutions. - Experience operating large scale distributed systems in production, especially logging platforms or time series databases. - Strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure such as Kubernetes and AWS. - Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems end to end. - Product mindset or full stack instincts and excited to build real tools engineers love to use. - Strong communicator who can align technical and non technical stakeholders. Company context: Gusto builds payroll and HR software with broad product, platform, security, and data hiring across North America.
Day-to-day expectations
Gusto lists these responsibilities for the Staff Software Engineer, Observability role.
- Shape the engineering organization standards around observability.
- Own and evolve the observability platform, including distributed logging, metrics, and tracing infrastructure.
- Build AI-native capabilities to automatically detect anomalies, diagnose failures, and accelerate root cause analysis.
- Create powerful developer experiences through dashboards, notebooks, and interactive debugging tools.
- Drive reliability automation with intelligent alerting, diagnostics, and incident response systems.
- Partner across engineering teams to embed observability and reliability best practices.
What a strong candidate brings
These requirements are extracted from the source listing and normalized for UpJobz readers.
- Strategic systems thinker who identifies high impact opportunities and builds scalable solutions.
- Experience operating large scale distributed systems in production, especially logging platforms or time series databases.
- Strong fundamentals in systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure such as Kubernetes and AWS.
- Thrive in ambiguous environments and roll up your sleeves to solve unscoped problems end to end.
- Product mindset or full stack instincts and excited to build real tools engineers love to use.
- Strong communicator who can align technical and non technical stakeholders.
Why this listing is more than a copied job post.
Staff Software Engineer, Observability is framed against UpJobz source checks, country scope, compensation visibility, and work-authorization signals so candidates can make a faster go/no-go decision.
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Source: job-boards.greenhouse.io Β· Source ID: 7674187 Β· Confidence: 91/100 Β· Last checked: May 7, 2026
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