Staff Product Designer

Gusto•San Francisco, NY

1d•$146,000 - $222,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is hiring several Staff Product Designers across its Money and HR Experience organizations. Designers will be matched to one of five openings across Consumer Banking, Gusto Money (MoneyOS), HR Experiences, and Retirement. These teams build high-stakes, AI-native products involving financial and people decisions, where trust, judgment, and craft are essential. The designer will own experiences end to end within a specific domain, turn ambiguity into clear and trustworthy products, and help define product patterns that do not yet exist at Gusto. The role is deeply embedded in a product quartet and partners with Product Managers and Engineers to make design decisions and deliver high-quality work. The teams address employee banking and cash-flow needs; help small businesses understand and manage their financial position; provide AI-enabled HR guidance with access to human experts; and make choosing and managing retirement plans more approachable for employers and employees. The work includes designing AI experiences that preserve customer agency, communicate uncertainty, handle errors, and bring in human support when appropriate.

Requirements

At least 6 years of product design experience owning and shipping end-to-end work.
Strong product design craft across web.
Experience designing AI-enabled or conversational experiences that have shipped to real users, with concrete examples of handling uncertainty, errors, and human override.
Comfort with ambiguity and 0→1 work, including framing problems, scoping work, and moving forward without perfect information.
Strong systems thinking, including experience using and contributing to a design system and knowing when to evolve it.
Judgment to evaluate and direct AI outputs, determine when to use or override them, and raise the quality bar, especially when mistakes carry high costs.
Strong collaboration and communication across design, product, engineering, and data.
Active engagement with AI tools relevant to the role and willingness to grow AI fluency.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a high-stakes or regulated domain such as fintech, financial services, HR, compliance, legal, or healthcare.
Hands-on experience designing AI-driven or agentic product experiences, including shaping AI or agent behavior, communication, and handoffs to people.
Service-design fluency across two-sided or multi-stakeholder products, including journey mapping and blueprinting with operational handoffs.
Experience helping lead a team's shift to AI-native workflows and explaining how the work itself changed.
Background contributing to AI governance, evaluation practices, or AI experience design patterns.
Experience in B2B SaaS, fintech, or another high-trust domain.

Responsibilities

Own design end to end in a domain, from framing ambiguous problems to shipping high-craft, accessible experiences that simplify complexity for customers.
Shape goals, priorities, and roadmaps with Product Managers and engineering leads, balancing customer trust, business value, and technical realities.
Translate ambiguous and often 0→1 strategy into clear scopes, flows, and interaction patterns, including patterns that do not yet exist at Gusto.
Design AI experiences that represent uncertainty, surface errors gracefully, preserve customer agency, and determine when a human should step in.
Ground design decisions in customer insight by leading or partnering on research, competitive audits, and hypothesis-driven exploration.
Raise the craft and systems bar, evolving Gusto's design system when existing patterns fall short.
Work in fast cycles and use AI tools in design practice; set targets, prototype and ship work to customers, and use learnings to refine direction.
Collaborate closely with Product Managers, engineers, and other partners in the product quartet.