Software Engineering Manager Payments

About the Team:

Money Movement (MM) is a core Payments Engineering team responsible for actually moving money at Gusto — reliably, on time, and at scale. The team owns Gusto’s payment rails and the integrations behind them: ACH, wires, real-time payments, checks, and international and stablecoin rails through partners. MM owns the connections to partner banks and payment providers, the APIs that initiate credits and debits, the ingestion of incoming bank data, and the routing logic that selects the most efficient rail for each payment based on speed, cost, geography, currency, and regulatory requirements. The team also builds the operational tooling that Payment Operations depends on to stop, reverse, verify, and investigate payments.

MM sits within the Payments org alongside the Financial Data and Payment Profile team. Where that team owns the source of truth for payment data and the customer-facing payment method experience, MM owns execution — the systems that hand money to a bank or partner and track it to settlement. The team operates tier-1 systems with clear reliability ownership, on-call responsibility, and defined SLOs measured across every rail, and is in the middle of extracting money movement out of the monolith into a standalone Payments Service with a rails-factory architecture and stable API contracts for upstream product teams.

As an Engineering Manager on the Money Movement team, you’ll directly empower a team of engineers, supporting them in their continued growth and success. You’ll collaborate with a talented cross-functional team of Product, Design, and Data partners, along with Payment Operations, Accounting, and Treasury, focusing on payments infrastructure that customers can trust with their payroll.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Develop the engineering team across the Money Movement domain to help build the long term vision of the payments team at Gusto. The leader will expand Gusto’s payment rails across the US and internationally while ensuring that our 500K+ businesses and millions of their employees are getting paid on time, every time.
• Lead, empower and coach a team across engineering for payments to i) drive technical guidance and consistent execution of the next generation of payment rails and money movement capabilities that enable Gusto to expand its product offerings; ii) recruit, hire, and onboard new engineering team members; iii) identify and address any roadblocks or challenges faced by the team; and iv) deliver scaled engineering solutions on time.
• Own reliable, efficient, compliant and cost effective end-to-end money movement across every rail — including on-call ownership, SLOs, and error budgets for tier-1 payment systems — and work cross-functionally with Payment Operations, Accounting and Treasury to de-risk any payments related issues with bank and provider partners.
• Drive the modularization of payments: lead the extraction of money movement into a standalone service with clean API contracts, so new rails can be added once at the platform layer instead of being re-integrated by every product team.
• Foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence within the team. In addition, collaborate and communicate with senior management and stakeholders to develop and execute long-term strategies for Gusto’s engineering department
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with cross-functional teams, including product, design, data science, and the upstream product teams that depend on payments, to make tradeoffs that build customer trust

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years of relevant hands-on programming experience
• 3+ years of engineering management experience
• Experience managing a Payments platform team
• Comfortable guiding the team strategically as well as contributing hands on where it’s needed to support the team. Expect to be reviewing code, and coding where it’s needed to move the team along.
• Experience with growing and managing talent with varied experience level
• Comfortable navigating a complex and ambiguous problem space, and asking for help and clarification when needed
• Willingness to debate and commit
• Experience in shipping a cross-functional projects and driving business growth
• A desire to grow and learn on the job
• Completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline; higher education preferred
• Stays informed about AI capabilities relevant to engineering teams and thoughtfully incorporates them into workflows, tooling, and decision-making.

• highly available, horizontally scalable systems, and continuing to reduce blast radius and improve the resilience of the databases we already operate.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $183,000-$200,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $222,000-$245,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.