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Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses take care of their teams. In addition to full-service payroll, Gusto offers access to health insurance, 401(k) integrations, HR experts, employee self-onboarding, and team management tools. The company serves over 400,000 businesses nationwide and has offices in Denver, New York City, and San Francisco. For more information, visit gusto.com.
Gusto has built a robust technology stack over the past decade centered around Ruby on Rails, which serves as the framework for all customer-facing applications. With an impressive history of over 250,000 commits, Gusto stands out as one of the largest users of Rails in the industry.
The architecture consists of two major monolithic applications supported by many smaller applications, all of which communicate seamlessly via Kafka, utilizing the Karafka gem. Gusto also uses Sidekiq to process over 150 million jobs daily, showcasing their commitment to performance and scalability.
To improve maintainability and promote agility, Gusto is progressively modularizing its codebase by adopting Packwerk, which facilitates a more flexible development environment. Additionally, Gusto is focused on service extraction and enhancing the functionality of its smaller applications, further streamlining development processes and improving overall developer productivity.
On the frontend, Gusto has invested heavily in a single-page application (SPA) architecture, which is integrated with the Rails backend using GraphQL.
By leveraging the strengths of Ruby on Rails, Kafka, Sidekiq, GraphQL, and modern frontend technologies, Gusto continues to deliver powerful solutions that meet the evolving needs of their customers.
In 2024, Gusto became a contributing member of the Rails Foundation.
Rails is at the center of a vibrant ecosystem and community of thousands of people and companies contributing to it in one way or another. As a company that relies heavily on Rails, Gusto benefits enormously from this ecosystem. As a Rails Foundation member, we’re proud to support the continued healthy growth of the framework and the community that powers it. It’s an investment not just in the technology we use today, but in the future we’re helping to build together.
Stephan Hagemann Head of Product Infrastructure Engineering
Internally, Gusto encourages and promotes open source contributions via an open source guild, having recently upstreamed some rubocop rules, improved the performance of lefthook, improved auto-install and the performance of bundler. They also continued to maintain buildkite-builder that Rails itself uses for its build pipeline. Gusto’s Head of Security maintains Brakeman, a static analysis security tool also used in Rails for checking security issues in your application.
Gusto actively sponsors individual open source contributors whose work they utilize in their projects. They have also begun supporting the Boulder Ruby Group to help foster the Ruby developer community, sponsored WNB.rb, and hosted Women Who Code events at their offices in Denver, New York City, and San Francisco.