Staff Engineer Software

Staff Engineer Software at Paylocity

Paylocity is a cloud-based software company renowned for creating customized HR solutions for small to mid-sized organizations. Our innovative workplace fosters enhanced communication, enabling employees to connect, collaborate, and create from any location. We pride ourselves on an award-winning culture where every voice is heard, and everyone feels genuinely welcome. Join Paylocity and contribute to shaping the future of technology and the workplace!

We empower our employees with comprehensive benefits and perks, including medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and a 401(k) match, alongside support for you, your family, and your finances. We also prioritize career development, offering ample opportunities for growth. At Paylocity, people are paramount and remain at the core of our business.

Help Paylocity further enhance communication and enable employees to connect, collaborate, and create from anywhere by joining our Product & Technology team as a Staff Engineer Software.

Do you aspire to develop the strategies and principles essential for delivering compelling software? Join us to enhance our all-in-one software platform, elevate our unique technology, and significantly improve the employee experience. Advance your career at Paylocity, recognized as one of G2's Top 100 Software Companies.

About The Team

The Payroll Calculations team is the proud owner of the core engine responsible for accurately calculating employee pay across Paylocity’s platform. This team designs and maintains critical systems that manage high data volumes, intricate business rules, and frequent regulatory updates, where precision and auditability are non-negotiable. Our work is central to payroll execution, directly influencing payroll accuracy, compliance, and customer trust throughout the entire product suite.

Are you the teammate we are looking for?

• Always developing towards the best customer experience possible.
• Stability and quality are at the forefront of everything you do.
• Focuses on the high-level goals and design of a project or direction and how it aligns to the overall vision.
• An advocate for continuous improvement of our software development process and shortening cycle times for software releases.
• Lifelong learner with boundless curiosity about current market and technology trends, able to adapt accordingly.
• Leads the team to make the right choices, in alignment with our technology direction, to promote scalable and stable solutions.
• Unintimidated by large, complex, high volume systems.
• Able to work in a remote-first collaborative environment with a willingness to share your ideas with team members and effectively engage other areas of the organization to help pressure-test ideas.
• Able to work independently on features and complete tasks with high quality, but unafraid to seek out suggestions from other team members.
• Nimble and responsive to the needs of the team.
• Dream big, start small mindset.
• Excited to work on cutting-edge technology.
• Passionate about mentoring, coaching developers, and willing to engage in feedback to drive best outcomes.

What You Will Do

• Set the strategic technical direction for the product team.
• Work closely with others to drive, influence, and evangelize the overall technical direction (including architectural vision, strategy, principles) for the organization within the team.
• Participate in various forums to evolve and push our technical vision.
• Work closely with Developers, Engineering Managers, SMEs, QA Engineers, Product Owners, Business Owners and product stakeholders to drive customer outcomes.
• Direct technical governance of a highly visible product team in a critical space.
• Work on proofs of concept and experiments based on team’s needs.
• Work closely across specialties to make deployments easier, improving team velocity and overall quality of delivery.
• Manage risks, escalated priorities and drive resolution of issues that could impact production stability.
• Elevate team members and act as a force multiplier within the team.
• Mentor, coach and empower technical team members while still taking a very active role in developing complex technical solutions.
• Strengthen our technical acumen as an organization by sharing knowledge and interests with other Staff Software Engineers.
• Interview new hires and assess the technical expertise of team members.
• Drive quarterly and multi-quarter technical initiatives aligned with stability, scalability, and compliance.

What You Will Bring

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, technology-related field, or equivalent experience.
• Minimum 8 years of software engineering experience.
• Solid understanding of Object-Oriented Analysis and Design.
• Proficiency in multiple .NET Frameworks, including .NET Core.
• Strong C#, NoSQL (MongoDB/PostgreSQL), SQL Server and profiling experience in a high transaction, large dataset environment.
• Should be well-versed with Software architecture patterns and developer tools.
• Proven experience in mentoring, coaching, performing code reviews and fostering a learning environment.
• Broad set of technical skills with demonstrated learning agility and intellectual curiosity.
• Must be able to work effectively in an agile environment.
• Has a proven track record in solving highly complex and scalable architectural problems, with a special focus on incrementally evolving tech debt into modern code.

Nice To Have

• Experience with modern engineering systems that deal with payroll data.
• Experience with message brokers (e.g. RabbitMQ).
• Experience with containerization technologies (e.g. Docker).

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role as a Staff Engineer Software is measured by meaningful improvements to the health, correctness, and scalability of the Payroll Calculations platform. Key outcomes include:

• Payroll calculation workflows become clearer and more predictable, safer to change, and more resilient to edge cases and compliance-driven complexity.
• Recurring production issues and data inconsistencies are reduced through deeper root cause analysis and durable fixes rather than repeated short-term patches.
• Technical risk in critical calculation paths is surfaced earlier and managed proactively through clearer architectural decisions, guardrails, and validation strategies.
• Legacy payroll logic and technical debt are incrementally modernized without disrupting payroll accuracy, customer trust, or operational stability.
• Engineering teams make higher quality technical decisions due to clearer technical direction, shared standards, and stronger system understanding, enabling the platform to scale with fewer incidents and less operational overhead.

Key skills/competency

• Software Architecture
• .NET Core Development
• C# Programming
• NoSQL Databases
• SQL Server Management
• Technical Mentorship
• Agile Methodologies
• Scalable System Design
• Technical Leadership
• Payroll Systems Expertise