Staff Product Designer

Title: Staff Product Designer Location: Denver, CO - Hybrid; New York, NY - Hybrid; San Francisco, CA - Hybrid

About the Role:

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.

• Retirement: The Retirement team is helping shape a product that recently joined Gusto, with plenty of room for design to influence how the two experiences come together. Small businesses often avoid offering 401(k) plans because they seem complex, burdensome, and costly. This team designs intuitive, end-to-end experiences that help employers choose, manage, and track the right 401(k) plan for their business, while supporting financial wellness and smarter savings strategies for their employees. By evolving out-dated forms of 401(k) planning, this team seeks to make retirement benefits approachable and meaningful.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day:

• 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.

Here's what we're looking for:

• 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.
• 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.
• Comfort with ambiguity and 0→1, you frame the problem, scope the work, and move forward without waiting for perfect information.
• Strong systems thinking, you use and contribute to a design system and know when to evolve it.
• 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.

Bonus points

• 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.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $146,000/yr to $183,000/yr in Denver, and $177,000/yr to $222,000/yr in San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.