About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy

Product Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the team

Gusto Embedded Payroll Platform is the newest major business segment within Gusto. Our mission is to enable developers to build and service payroll from their application backed by well over a decade of Gusto’s experience. This team is responsible for building out a combination of robust flexible developer APIs, embeddable UI flows, developer toolkits, and integration experiences that culminates in our Embedded Payroll product. As such we need to address the needs of our partners’ businesses, their development teams, as well as the employers and employees they serve. We believe that if we fulfill our mission, we will be able to see major strides in innovation at the intersection of fintech and labor. We operate as a different business within the larger Gusto organization with our own sales, marketing, support, and engineering, product, data and design team, while working with other teams to evolve the Gusto platform and provide a world-class experience.

About the opportunity

As the Principal Product Designer for Gusto’s Embedded Payroll Platform, you’ll be responsible for driving the strategic experience direction of this business segment, and involved in the entire product development process from research to creating a vision to iterating on an experience for launch. Given that this initiative and team are still relatively new, you’ll have a lot of opportunity for influence to shape the direction of the team and the practice. Gusto is first and foremost customer-driven. We take pride in making informed decisions based on customer research and data while balancing short and long term technical decisions. If you are a strategic customer advocate who enjoys complex problems and improving customer experiences, we’d love to hear from you!

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

  • You’ll drive the research strategy for Gusto Embedded Payroll, cultivate deep empathy for our customers and translate both qualitative insights and quantitative data into creative ideas and informed design decisions — while encouraging everyone on the team to deepen their understanding and connection to our customers.
  • Strategically balance the needs of this complex ecosystem of customers: Employees, their employers, and developers integrating Gusto Embedded Payroll.
  • Design a great developer experience starting from our developer documentation through to powerful admin tools to empower developers who are building great payroll experiences on top of Gusto’s platform. 
  • Work with senior leadership in Gusto’s Embedded Payroll team to provide expertise on how to create a flexible system that empowers developers to build approachable, easy-to-use integrated payroll experiences for employers and their employees.
  • Partner with PMs, engineers, and Product Marketers, and other people from our cross-functional design team to oversee user experience for products and features from conception to launch.
  • Cultivate a creative design process that is built on inclusion and strong cross-functional collaboration.
  • Provide and seek feedback from other designers to always push the bar for quality.

Here’s what we're looking for:

  • 8+ years’ experience — with a good portion of that time spent working on platform, ecosystem or developer experience teams.
  • Experience designing and shipping complex products founded in data and customer insights.
  • Ability to form clear hypotheses around design decisions and lay out a path to validate them.
  • Industry experience designing at every step of the development process, from brainstorming to post-launch research.
  • Generative and evaluative research experience.
  • Strong UX craft — you can break down complex experiences and design with consideration for all touch points. 
  • Experience balancing long-term design goals with an Agile-based iterative approach. 
  • Strong communication skills and enthusiasm for collaborating across the entire company.
  • Ability to embrace ambiguous situations as opportunities to create.
  • Passion for Gusto’s mission and the impact we can have on the world.

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). Our cash compensation range for this role is $152,000/yr to $232,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $185,000/yr to $251,000/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.


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.


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. If you require assistance in filling out a Gusto job application, please reach out to candidate-accommodations@gusto.com.

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