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.
About the Role:
At Gusto, HR Experiences (HRX) helps small businesses get expert HR help right inside the product. Instead of hunting through forms and menus — or Googling what the law requires — a customer can simply say what they need, and Gusto does the rest: taking the action, answering the question, or bringing in a human expert when the stakes are high.
As a Product Designer on HRX, you'll shape these AI-native experiences end to end, in a domain where getting it right builds real trust — and getting it wrong has real consequences for our customers. That's exactly why judgment, taste, and craft matter here in a way they don't in lower-stakes products.
About the Team:
HRX is building the guidance and service layer that turns HR from a source of tension into a source of confidence for small businesses. We design across the full experience — 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.
Gusto Design is operating in an AI-native way, and HRX is one of the teams fostering that hardest. We expect designers here to bring AI fluency in two directions:
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AI in your workflow. Using AI to explore ideas, prototype, and synthesize research — so you progress faster without losing craft.
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AI in the product. Designing the experience of AI outputs — representing uncertainty, surfacing errors gracefully, preserving user agency when a recommendation conflicts with best practice, and knowing when a human should step in.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
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Shape AI-native HR experiences end to end — where the customer says what they need and the product delivers the right outcome, without exposing the underlying complexity.
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Lead service design across a two-sided experience — journey mapping and blueprinting the routing and handoffs between the customer, the AI, and human HR experts.
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Make and defend judgment calls about AI outputs — when they're ready to ship, when to keep a human in the loop, and when they shouldn't ship at all — designing for failure so trust holds in the hard moments.
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Ground the work in a specific customer and hold a high craft bar from strategy through pixel-level execution.
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Partner with PM, engineering, and data as a co-owner of product direction — framing ambiguous problems early and spearheading clarity when the picture isn't yet clear.
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Work in fast cycles: set a clear target for an experience, ship real things to customers, and let what you learn sharpen the direction.
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Conduct and direct research with customers and HR experts to validate decisions in a high-stakes, compliance-sensitive domain.
Here’s what we're looking for:
What you’ll need:
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5+ years of product design experience owning and shipping work in a B2B SaaS environment, with robust craft across web.
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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.
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Experience in service design for products with two sides or multiple stakeholders. You should have real journey mapping and blueprinting experience. This includes operational handoffs and should not be limited to workshop exercises.
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Judgment to evaluate and direct AI outputs — knowing when to use them, when to override them, and how to raise the bar — especially where the cost of being wrong is high.
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Comfort with ambiguity — you frame the problem, scope the work, and proceed forward without waiting for perfect information.
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Well-developed collaboration and communication across design, product, engineering, and data.
Bonus points
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Experience in a high-stakes or regulated domain — HR, compliance, fintech, legal, or healthcare.
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Helped lead a team's shift to AI-native workflows, and can speak to what changed about the work itself, not just the tools.
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Background contributing to AI governance, evaluation practices, or AI experience design patterns.
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Experience designing for internal or expert users (advisors, agents, support staff) alongside customer-facing surfaces.
Compensation Details
