Staff Product Designer

Skills this role screens for

About the role

About Gusto

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.

The work

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:

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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.

• 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.
• 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.

The work

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.

Who they want

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.

Nice to have

Bonus points

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.

At Gusto, we don't use titles the traditional way, as a signal of rank or hierarchy. Instead, our titles describe two things at once — your craft (what you do, e.g. Engineering, Design) and your scope of ownership (what you're accountable for) — which is why you'll see something like "Head of X" instead of a rank word like "Director" that tells you neither. Because of this, the title on this posting may look different from what you'd expect based on the scope and seniority of the role, and from how similar roles are typically titled elsewhere. If you have questions about how this role compares to your current title or level, your recruiter can help translate.

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.…

• 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.