At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.
All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.
AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.
About the Role:
The HR Expertise pod builds Gusto's knowledge and guidance layer — the part of the product that makes a small business feel like it has an expert HR team in its corner, not just a software tool. That layer is increasingly AI-driven: AI-generated guidance, AI-drafted documents, AI workflows for human HR advisors, and the compliance knowledge graph underneath all of it.
This role sits at the intersection of service design and AI product design. You'll shape how Gusto delivers HR expertise across two sides of a service: the small business owner asking for help, and the HR expert delivering it. You'll design AI-assisted experiences in a domain where mistakes have legal consequences for our customers — which is exactly why judgment, preference, and craft matter here in a way they don't in lower-stakes products.
About the Team:
The HR Experiences team at Gusto wants to make HR a reliable support for small businesses. They create smart guidance, tools for advisors, and a compliance layer. This helps provide top-quality HR support in a way that feels simple and easy to access.
Gusto Design is operating in an AI-native way, and HRX is one of the teams encouraging that envelope hardest. We expect this role to bring fluency with AI in two directions:
AI in your workflow. Using AI to accelerate exploration, prototyping, research synthesis, and content drafting — so the team moves faster without losing craft.
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AI in the product. You will design the user experience for AI-generated outputs. This means showing uncertainty clearly and displaying errors in a user-friendly way. You will also ensure that users can keep control when AI suggestions differ from HR best practices. Additionally, you will create moments for customers or advisors to correct the system if necessary.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
Shape the end-to-end experience of HR Assist, HR Partner Console, Compliance Intelligence, and HR Documents — four AI-powered product surfaces that share a common knowledge layer.
Lead service design across the two-sided product: journey maps, service blueprints, and operational handoffs between AI systems, human advisors, and small business customers.
Make judgment calls about AI outputs — when to ship them, when to override them, when to put a human in the loop, and how to articulate why a generated direction is or isn't good enough.
Define how trust, uncertainty, graceful failure, and human override show up across these surfaces — patterns that will inform AI experience design across the broader HRX org.
Co-lead product direction with PM, engineering, and data partners across four teams. You'll be a co-owner of strategy, not a downstream executor of it.
Frame ambiguous problems and align partners around a clear direction, often before the data is in.
Conduct and direct research with customers and HR partners to validate these experiences in a high-stakes compliance domain.
What you’ll need:
You've shipped AI-powered experiences to production — not prototypes — and can speak concretely to how you handled uncertainty, errors, and human override.
Experience in service design for products that involve two sides or multiple stakeholders. You should have real experience with journey mapping and service blueprinting, including operational handoffs, not just in workshop exercises.
You can evaluate and direct AI-generated design and content — knowing when to use it, when to override it, and how to raise the bar. In a compliance domain, "wrong" isn't just bad UX; it's legal exposure for our customers.
Cross-functional judgment to co-lead direction with PM, engineering, and data — and hold your position when the right answer is unpopular.
Comfort with ambiguity — you frame the problem, scope the work, and advance forward without waiting for perfect information.
5+ years of product design experience owning shipped work in B2B SaaS, with well-developed craft across web. (Figma and a modern design toolchain assumed.)
Bonus points:
Experience in a consequential domain — HR, compliance, fintech, legal, or healthcare — where the cost of being wrong is real.
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.
Experience designing for internal operators or expert users (advisors, agents, support staff) alongside customer-facing surfaces.
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 $146,000/yr to $183,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $177,000/yr to $222,000/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.
Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.
Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.
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