Staff Product Designer

Gusto, Inc.•Denver, CO

9d•$146,000 - $222,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Gusto is hiring several Staff Product Designers across its Money and HR Experience organizations, with candidates matched to one of five openings based on their strengths and interests. These teams work on high-stakes, AI-native products where small businesses and employees make financial and people decisions, making trust, judgment, and craft central to the work. In a specific product domain, the Staff Product Designer owns experiences end to end, turns ambiguity into clear and trustworthy products, and helps define patterns that do not yet exist at Gusto. The role is embedded in a product quartet and partners closely with Product Managers and Engineers to shape design decisions, with strong craft and storytelling throughout. The hiring teams include Consumer Banking, which builds financial products for employees paid through Gusto; Gusto Money’s MoneyOS, which helps small businesses understand and improve their financial position; HR Experiences, which combines self-service, AI guidance, and human HR expertise; and Retirement, which creates intuitive experiences for employers managing 401(k) plans and employees pursuing financial wellness. The role involves designing AI experiences that handle uncertainty and errors gracefully, preserve customer agency, and bring in human support when appropriate. Designers ground decisions in customer insight, contribute to the design system, work in fast cycles, and use AI tools in their own practice to prototype, ship, and learn. Gusto has offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees based in those locations are expected to work from the office on designated days approximately two to three days per week, or more depending on the role. Similar office expectations apply to Symmetry roles based in Scottsdale. When approved to work elsewhere, employees need a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection and are expected to maintain regular, predictable attendance and responsiveness. Gusto describes itself as an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans. Personal information collected during the application process is subject to Gusto’s Applicant Privacy Notice.

Requirements

At least 6 years of product design experience owning and shipping end-to-end work, ideally in B2B SaaS, fintech, or another high-trust domain.
Strong product design craft across web.
Experience designing AI-enabled or conversational experiences shipped to real users, with the ability to discuss handling uncertainty, errors, and human override.
Comfort with ambiguity and 0-to-1 work, including framing problems, scoping work, and making progress 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 quality standards, especially where errors carry significant costs.
Strong collaboration and communication across design, product, engineering, and data.

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 humans.
Service-design fluency in 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 describing how the work itself changed.
Background contributing to AI governance, evaluation practices, or AI experience design patterns.

Responsibilities

Own design end to end in a product domain, from framing ambiguous problems to shipping high-craft, accessible experiences that simplify underlying complexity for customers.
Shape goals, priorities, and roadmap with the Product Manager and engineering lead, balancing customer trust, business value, and technical realities.
Translate ambiguous, often 0-to-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 in high-stakes and sometimes compliance-sensitive domains.
Raise the craft and systems bar and evolve Gusto’s design system when existing patterns fall short.
Work in fast cycles, use AI tools in the design practice, set clear targets, prototype and ship real products to customers, and use learnings to refine direction.