Senior Staff Product Designer

About Design at Gusto

Design at Gusto is made up of over 80 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We're a cross-functional group that is always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don't care much about swim lanes and though we care deeply about quality and craft, we are never precious about it. We work closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build, and ship experiences that make a real difference. We believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful.

We are building an AI-native design organization — and we mean that seriously. We're looking for designers who are already working this way: using AI to prototype ideas quickly, shorten customer feedback loops, and ship quality UX directly to customers. This isn't a future aspiration — it's how we work now, and it's changing what the design role looks like at Gusto and across the industry.

About the role

Gusto is building the financial platform that small businesses will rely on for the next decade, and AI is at the center of that. From how businesses move money, to how Gusto manages risk and verifies identity, AI is changing what's possible across every part of the experience. The design challenge is defining what it looks like to build those products right: not just faster and smarter, but genuinely trustworthy for the hundreds of thousands of businesses and employees who depend on them.

As the Sr. Staff Product Designer, Finance, you'll set the UX vision and strategy across four interconnected product areas: Business Money, Consumer Money, Payments, and Risk. Your role is to see what individual teams can't, identifying opportunities and systemic gaps that span the full financial experience, and to drive the work that makes Gusto's financial products feel clear, trustworthy, and empowering for hundreds of thousands of small businesses and their employees. Nobody has fully figured out what AI-first financial UX looks like at scale. This role is the chance to define it at Gusto.

Your work will span the full scope: defining a long-term UX vision that connects financial and trust experiences across teams, identifying and driving high-impact opportunities that no single pod could tackle alone, and shaping product strategy alongside product directors and engineering leaders. You'll step in as a direct IC on the highest-priority projects, develop other designers, and contribute platform patterns that scale beyond the Money and Risk teams.

About the team

The Money team builds the financial products that help small businesses and their employees move, manage, and access money—from the tools owners use to run their business finances, to the financial benefits available to their teams. As Gusto deepens its financial ecosystem, this team sits at the center of making money movement faster, simpler, and more empowering for hundreds of thousands of small businesses and the people who work for them.

The Risk team is the trust layer that makes all of it possible. They build the systems that protect customers and Gusto from fraud and financial exposure, and the identity infrastructure that determines how customers verify who they are and how they access Gusto's financial products. It's foundational work: quiet when it's working, critical when it's not.

Together, these two teams own one of the broadest and most consequential design scopes at Gusto.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Set the UX vision and strategy across the Money and Risk teams, connecting the dots across multiple pods and ensuring a cohesive experience throughout the platform.
• Identify and drive high-impact design opportunities across the Money and Risk teams, spotting what individual pods can't see from inside their area, and bringing the right partners along to pursue them.
• Influence product strategy, roadmap priorities, and team OKRs across Money and Risk through a design lens—operating as a senior design co-owner alongside product directors and engineering leaders.
• Define what AI-first financial UX looks like at Gusto, including how to represent uncertainty clearly, surface errors gracefully, preserve user agency when AI recommendations are wrong, and build trust across consequential automated decisions.
• Own how the Money and Risk teams build and share customer understanding: setting learning priorities, synthesizing insights across pods, and ensuring customer knowledge consistently informs direction rather than sitting siloed within individual teams.
• Shape and raise the quality bar for experiences across the Money and Risk teams through hands-on design work, setting direction, and ensuring what ships reflect a high standard of craft. Step in as a direct IC on specific projects when necessary.
• Develop other designers on Money and Risk through coaching, critique, and structured mentorship, acting as a force multiplier, not just a strong individual contributor.
• Champion and evolve Gusto's design system and platform standards through your product work, contributing patterns and frameworks that scale beyond Money and Risk.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of Product Design experience, with a track record of leading design direction across multiple teams, pods, or product domains simultaneously, not just a single-product or single-pod context.
• You've designed for high-trust, high-stakes experiences where errors have real consequences and clarity is non-negotiable (e.g. payments, risk, compliance, healthcare, or similar). Fintech or financial services background is a plus.
• You've shaped product strategy at the domain or portfolio level alongside product directors and engineering leaders, not just executed within a single product scope.
• You have a high bar for craft and stay hands-on, prototyping, iterating, and shipping alongside strategy, not just advising from above. You raise the bar for the designers around you through coaching, critique, and mentorship.
• You advance experience architectures and service models that span multiple teams, identifying systemic opportunities and organizational barriers, and driving changes that improve coherence and outcomes at scale.
• You thrive in ambiguity, lead through influence across teams, and are skilled at anticipating organizational friction, structuring how design work is coordinated across multiple teams to maximize impact and reduce drag.
• You actively use AI in your own design practice and can direct others to do the same, evaluating AI-generated outputs critically, knowing when to override or course-correct, and raising the quality bar on AI-assisted work across the teams you support.
• You have a point of view on how AI is changing product design, and you've acted on it. You can articulate what you've learned and where you think it's going.

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). To learn more about Gusto’s compensation philosophy and benefits offerings please view our Total Rewards Approach page.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $172,000/yr to $215,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $202,000/yr to $253,000/yr in San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.

#LI-DNI