About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

About Design at Gusto

Design at Gusto is made up of over 80 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We're a cross-functional group that is always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don't care much about swim lanes and though we care deeply about quality and craft, we are never precious about it. We work closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build, and ship experiences that make a real difference. We believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful.

We are building an AI-native design organization — and we mean that seriously. We're looking for designers who are already working this way: using AI to prototype ideas quickly, shorten customer feedback loops, and ship quality UX directly to customers. This isn't a future aspiration — it's how we work now, and it's changing what the design role looks like at Gusto and across the industry.

About the role:

We’re hiring a Principal Product Designer to lead AI design across Gusto.

This is one of the most senior individual contributor design roles at the company. You’ll define how AI works, behaves, and earns trust across the Gusto platform – starting with Gus, our AI conversational assistant, and expanding into AI-powered workflows embedded in payroll, benefits, HR, and beyond. You’ll shape the interaction model, UX principles, and product direction for AI across Gusto. You will work with senior Product and Engineering leaders to define our AI portfolio. You will develop important AI features that customers will consider. These features will help customers finish their tasks faster and build their trust in Gusto.

This role is both strategic and hands-on. We’re looking for someone who can set a long-term UX vision for AI and turn it into real, shipped product that meaningfully improves how small businesses get work done.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Define and evolve the UX vision for our Gus conversational assistant and AI experiences across the Gusto platform.
• Lead and ship Tier 1 AI initiatives from early concept through launch and iteration.
• Design full AI-powered workflows – shaping how users provide input, how model outputs are validated and acted on, and how the experience handles risk, uncertainty, and failure.
• Partner closely with AI Product and Engineering leaders to translate complex technical constraints into intuitive, credible user experiences.
• Establish scalable AI interaction patterns and design principles that teams across Gusto can adopt.
• Write and iterate on prompts in collaboration with engineering, PM, and content design.
• Prototype AI experiences using modern AI-native tools.
• Mentor designers on the AI team and coach designers across Gusto who are shipping AI features.
• Advocate for high-quality, responsible AI experiences across Design and R&D.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• Proven AI product impact: You’ve shipped LLM-driven product experiences to production and can demonstrate measurable impact on adoption, efficiency, or user trust.
• Systems-level thinking: You’ve designed complete AI workflows – not just chat interfaces – and can speak fluently about failure modes, guardrails, user control, and transparency.
• Strategic product influence: You’ve defined UX direction at a portfolio or company level and influenced roadmap, scope, and sequencing decisions in partnership with senior PM and Engineering leaders.
• Technical fluency: You’re comfortable collaborating with highly technical AI engineers. You understand concepts like retrieval, context management, latency, and model reliability, and can translate them into robust UX decisions.
• Builder mindset: You ship. You prototype. You iterate. You’re not interested in defining principles without turning them into real customer impact.
• Organizational leadership: You have enhanced team work quality. You achieved this by coaching team members, setting new standards, and building solid partnerships across different functions.

Compensation Details

At Gusto, we strive to provide rewards that empower employees to achieve their financial and personal goals. We offer competitive compensation packages with a strong emphasis on equity based compensation (ownership in Gusto). To learn more about Gusto’s compensation philosophy and benefits offerings please view our Total Rewards Approach page.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $204,000/yr to $238,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $240,000/yr to $280,000/yr in 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.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.