Software Engineer - Observability Engineering

Posted Jun 7

Observability at Gusto is part of the Developer Experience team, a highly impactful, small but growing, engineering team that empowers the 200+ engineers at Gusto. Gusto product engineers move tens of billions of our customers’ dollars every year and the Developer Experience team helps them work efficiently, securely, and enjoyably.

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

This role is a Software Engineering role in our Technical Infrastructure Foundation Engineering group organization. The ideal candidate will be able to understand the needs of Gusto Product Engineers, and build the tools and services owned by the Developer Experience engineering team. The Developer Experience team is engaged at all phases of the Software Development Lifecycle, we build tools to increase efficiency during feature development, ensure our continuous integration and continuous deployment process is efficient and delivers fast feedback, and provide observability tools to help engineers understand the behavior of our software in production.

Here's what you'll do (and we'll support you so you're great at it):

  • Build and improve our Observability Platform such that Engineers can easily understand the behavior and performance of their services in production environments.
  • Support Gusto Product Engineers on strategic questions about our Observability Platform (currently Datadog) and tactical questions that arise as they seek to understand logs, metrics, and traces.
  • Help Gusto Product Engineers detect incidents and errors more quickly and improve their onbcall shifts by improving the signal to noise ratio of our Observability Platform (currently Datadog).
  • Improve the cost / value ratio of our investment in our Observability Platform
  • Improve internal libraries (Ruby / Javascript) to guide Gusto Product Engineers towards Observability best practices
  • Ensure our services communicate with each other seamlessly, have minimal downtime, and recover quickly.
  • Collaborate with the rest of the engineering team on coming up with best practices for writing, maintaining and running reliable services.
  • Improve our infrastructure setup and deployment strategies.
  • Impact the productivity and happiness of our entire team with the tools you build. You'll be the daily recipient of hugs and high-fives from our engineering and support teams.
  • Collaborate with the tools development team to improve our deploy pipeline.
  • Pager-duty rotation: Never fear! Most issues occur during work hours.
  • Work with our product engineering teams to ensure high performance of our services.

You'll know you're a good fit for this role if you have:

  • Strong understanding of observability and monitoring philosophies along with tooling knowledge of Datadog (preferred) or other comparable tools
  • 3+ years of experience in a Platform, SRE, or DevOps role using a Ruby/Kubernetes/AWS/Datadog stack or similar technologies
  • Experience developing best practices to build out and maintain secure infrastructure, continuous integrationCI systems, service oriented applications, and more
  • Enjoys working and deploying technologies such as Kubernetes, AWS, Ruby, Rails, MySql, Datadog, and Redis
  • Loves building tools enabling engineers to move faster, while maintaining security
  • Understands the importance of security and compliance when working with personal data
  • Tests infrastructure changes thoroughly and likes to double and triple check everything

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $142,000 - 197,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $183,000-$197,000 for San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

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. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at accommodations@gusto.com.