Staff Product Designer Gusto
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform for small businesses.
Permanent
Denver, New York, San Francisco
Remote: Not specified
146K to 222K $ a year
> 5 years
Payroll
Design system
Collaboration and teamwork
You'll be part of
Denver, New York, San Francisco
3794 employees
Finance
Our take
For many small businesses, vital administrative tasks such as payroll, taxes, and benefits are manual tasks that take time and energy which many SMB owners don’t have. The three co-founders of Gusto – all coming from small business backgrounds – collaborated on a Fintech company that would handle employee payments, benefits administration, and compliance support specifically for small businesses. The company may have started slowly, as the founders focused on nailing each individual aspect of Gusto’s operations, but has now skyrocketed to unicorn status with more than 400,000 customers and a multi-billion dollar valuation. And in 2021, Gusto began acquiring other companies to strengthen its offering and its position in a competitive market, including two other fintech startups, Ardius and Symmetry. Through its continued acquisitions and fundraising efforts, the company has carved out a strong position for itself in the space. Although Gusto has found itself impacted by the macroeconomic situation, through the significant effect it has had on its clientele, the company still appears positive for the future after raising funds in 2023 that has seen it reach key profitability benchmarks. It continues to expand its platform, most recently partnering with Parafin to launch a payroll line of credit for small businesses. With a growing suite of services and a clear focus on supporting small businesses through changing economic conditions, Gusto looks set to sustain its momentum and further strengthen its position in the HR and payroll technology market.
You'll be working on
- Gusto’s looking to bring on several Staff Product Designers across our Money and HR Experience product organizations
- These teams sit on some of the highest-stakes, most AI-native surfaces at Gusto, where small businesses make financial and people decisions that carry real impact, and where getting the experience right is what builds durable trust. That’s exactly why judgment, taste, and craft matter here
- As a Staff Product Designer, you’ll own experiences end to end within a specific domain, turning ambiguity into clear, trustworthy products and helping define patterns that don’t yet exist at Gusto
- You’ll be deeply embedded in the product quartet, driving design decisions in partnership with Product Managers and Engineers, and demonstrating high craft and storytelling every step of the way
- This is one job posting for five open roles in Gusto Money, Banking, and HR Experiences product orgs. You’ll be matched to the opportunity that best fits your strengths and interests. Here are the teams currently hiring:
- Consumer Banking: Consumer Banking builds financial products for the millions of employees paid through Gusto, anchored to Gusto Wallet — spend accounts, savings goals, paycheck splitting, and on-demand access to earned wages
- Because Gusto runs payroll, the team sits at the source of income itself, helping workers smooth cash flow between paychecks, save automatically, and avoid predatory alternatives like payday lenders and overdraft fees
- One of the fastest-growing engines in Gusto Banking, it moves at a startup pace while incubating 0→1 foundational technology in a regulated space where trust, reliability, and craft are everything
- Gusto Money: MoneyOS is the team within Gusto Money focused on helping small businesses better understand, manage, and improve their financial position. This is an especially exciting moment for the team
- The space is still taking shape, which means there’s real room to define the product, the patterns, and the customer expectations
- MoneyOS works at the intersection of product strategy, financial systems, customer trust, and emerging AI-native ways of building—making it a strong fit for a designer who wants to have outsized influence on both what we build and how we build it
- HR Experiences (HRX): HRX helps small businesses get expert HR help right inside the product — a customer simply says what they need, and Gusto takes the action, answers the question, or brings in a human expert when the stakes are high
- You’ll design AI-native experiences across a two-sided service — the everyday self-serve moments, the AI that guides and does the work, and the human HR experts who step in when it matters most — so it all feels like one Gusto, in a domain where judgment and trust matter enormously
- Own design end to end in your domain — from framing ambiguous problems to shipping high-craft, accessible experiences that hide the underlying complexity from customers
- Shape goals, priorities, and roadmap in partnership with your PM and engineering lead, balancing customer trust, business value, and technical realities
- Translate ambiguous, often 0→1 strategy into clear scopes, flows, and interaction patterns — including patterns that don’t yet exist at Gusto
- Design the experience of AI thoughtfully — representing uncertainty, surfacing errors gracefully, preserving customer agency, and knowing when a human should step in
- Ground your decisions in customer insight, leading or partnering on research, competitive audits, and hypothesis-driven exploration in high-stakes, sometimes compliance-sensitive domains
- Raise the craft and systems bar, evolving Gusto’s design system where existing patterns fall short
- Work in fast cycles and use AI tools in your own practice — set a clear target, prototype and ship real things to customers, and let what you learn sharpen the direction
Benefits
- Gender-affirming care and support
- Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
- A variety of mental health resources
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
- Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
- Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more
We're looking for
- Experience designing AI-enabled or conversational experiences shipped to real users, and you can speak concretely to how you handled uncertainty, errors, and human override
- 6+ years of product design experience owning and shipping end-to-end work, ideally in B2B SaaS, fintech, or another high-trust domain, with strong craft across web
- Comfort with ambiguity and 0→1, you frame the problem, scope the work, and move forward without waiting for perfect information
- Judgment to evaluate and direct AI outputs, when to use them, when to override them, and how to raise the bar, especially where the cost of being wrong is high
- Strong collaboration and communication across design, product, engineering, and data
- Strong systems thinking, you use and contribute to a design system and know when to evolve it
- Experience in a high-stakes or regulated domain, fintech, financial services, HR, compliance, legal, or healthcare
- Hands-on experience designing AI-driven or agentic product experiences, shaping how an AI or agent behaves, communicates, and hands off to a human
- Service-design fluency across two-sided or multi-stakeholder products: real journey mapping and blueprinting with operational handoffs, not workshop exercises
- Helped lead a team’s shift to AI-native workflows, and can speak to what changed about the work itself, not just the tools
- Background contributing to AI governance, evaluation practices, or AI experience design patterns