Gusto

Introduction

At Gusto, I contributed to the Payroll Compliance team, building systems that automated Power of Attorney (POA) form management. These forms are required for Gusto to represent customers in tax filings across states and jurisdictions. My work improved record-keeping, enabled automation, and scaled the processing of thousands of tax authorization forms daily.

Tax Authorization Form Table

Created a dedicated database table to store tax authorization forms separately from other form types. This separation allowed us to enforce immutability—no row modifications, only new row insertions—which strengthened historical record-keeping and simplified compliance audits.

Tax Authorization Forms API

Developed Rails + GraphQL APIs for managing POA forms with immutability in mind. Every “modification” was modeled as the creation of a new row, ensuring that historical versions were preserved. Learned and applied efficient querying strategies to handle this new data structure at scale.

Frontend Integration in Production

Since tax authorization forms already existed in Gusto’s product but were tied to a legacy table, I integrated the new schema into production. This required extending GraphQL schemas and mutations to support multi-table edits and making the new forms visible in React-based customer dashboards. Learned how Gusto’s hybrid GraphQL–React architecture differs from traditional MVC.

Autosigning

Engineered an autosigning feature to automatically sign eligible authorization forms. Carefully weighed trade-offs between synchronous and asynchronous signing flows, handling edge cases like unsigning events and signatory changes. This automation reduced manual toil and improved consistency for customers across jurisdictions.

Notifications

Extended the project with a digest mailer system that delivered daily summaries of over 10,000 signed forms via 2,000+ queued jobs. This was my first exposure to scheduled jobs, idempotency strategies, and multi-tier job worker architectures to mitigate failures.

Beyond the technical aspects, this project taught me how to navigate cross-functional projects in a real-world engineering environment. Key learnings included:

This internship gave me a comprehensive view of how compliance-driven engineering blends backend infrastructure, product integration, and operational excellence.