# Gusto

> Gusto runs payroll for hundreds of thousands of American businesses, and a large share of that work happens asynchronously, in the background, on a deadline. When Gusto wanted deeper expertise in that layer, it brought in Evil Martians to work alongside its own engineering team.

- URL: https://evilmartians.com/clients/gusto
- Industries: HR-tech, FinTech, Y Combinator
- Employees: 1000–5000

## Key facts

- **$9.3B+**: valuation
- **$1B**: annual revenue
- **500K+**: businesses on payroll

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Payroll is unforgiving work: jobs have to run on time, in the right order, and without dropping anything. Our engineer embedded directly in Gusto's platform team, bringing hands-on Sidekiq and background jobs expertise to the systems that keep payroll moving. Early on, that also meant fixing bugs in the open source libraries Gusto depends on, rather than working around them.

The whole engagement ran fully async across time zones: work was picked up, shipped, and handed back without anyone needing to coordinate around a shared clock.