The opportunity
At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers.
What you'll do
Design and build across the Otto platform, including the runtime and agent: graph, the tool/action layer, the Rails/GraphQL backend, and the advocate-facing experience, owning a meaningful slice end-to-end
Expand what the agent can safely do: autonomous, tool-using actions with human-in-the-loop approval, built on a secure, auditable identity and permissions model
Build the eval and observability systems (LLM-as-judge + deterministic: scorers, offline gates and online production monitoring) that let us change the agent in production weekly without regressing correctness or escalation behavior
Work directly with LLMs, including prompting, tool/function design,: retrieval, and the feedback loops that turn real advocate interactions into a better Otto
Partner closely with Product, Data, Design, and our CX teams to turn advocate: and customer pain into shipped capabilities
Mentor engineers and set the bar for how we build agentic systems responsibly and at scale
What they're looking for
- Typically 8+ years of software engineering experience, owning systems end-to-end
- You've built and shipped LLM-powered or agentic systems in production,: including tool-calling/agents, retrieval, or evals, and you know where they break and how to make them reliable
- Strong full-stack range. Must be comfortable moving between backend services,: an LLM runtime, and customer-facing product, and picking up whatever the problem needs
- Experience owning multi-quarter projects that make measurable user impact at scale
