Senior Staff Product Designer, Payments & Risk

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 400,000 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. 

About the Role:

Are you ready to redefine how small businesses interact with their money? As a Senior Staff Product Designer on Gusto’s Payments and Risk Platform, you'll design seamless and consistent money movement experiences across all of Gusto’s products and services, while simultaneously building trust and ensuring safety by developing intuitive systems that prevent, mitigate, and resolve fraudulent activity.

As a strategic partner, you'll collaborate closely with your immediate cross-functional team and other Gusto product teams who rely on your expertise to integrate payments and risk solutions. You'll be empowered to set a bold vision, define our long-term strategy, and ship high-impact features that continuously improve our offerings. A key part of your role will be ensuring everything we design and deliver operates reliably at scale

If you're a systems thinker who thrives in ambiguity, can simplify the complex, and consistently delivers customer impact, we'd love to meet you. 

About the Team:

The Payments and Risk Platform is the foundation to Gusto’s success. We ensure money moves seamlessly and securely between businesses, partners, employees, government entities, and Gusto itself.

We're dedicated to both enabling rapid, efficient money movement and securing our platform against financial fraud and risk. This involves a complete re-architecture of Gusto's core payments platform to move money faster and more efficiently than ever before, fostering growth for Gusto and our customers alike. Simultaneously, we're focused on safeguarding our platform by designing best-in-class experiences that prevent fraudsters from abusing Gusto, continuously improving our false positive rates, and building the infrastructure for credit underwriting and collections.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Define and drive a long-term UX vision for your product area, ensuring it seamlessly integrates with Gusto’s broader strategic objectives.
• Significantly influence product strategy, roadmap development, team OKRs, and overall project direction, acting as a key voice in decision-making.
• Balance speed with strategic foresight, delivering urgent customer improvements while ensuring they consistently elevate the long-term customer experience and align with our evolving vision.
• Collaborate closely with our research team to uncover deep user insights that directly inform and strengthen your design decisions.
• Contribute actively to Gusto’s vibrant product design leadership community, sharing your expertise and shaping our collective design excellence.
• Champion and evolve our design system and platform standards, applying them rigorously in your product work and identifying opportunities for their continuous improvement.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of product design experience, with a proven track record of leading design direction across complex, high-leverage product areas.
• A strong history of shaping product strategy and driving design execution, delivering simple, intuitive experiences within complex or technical domains—ideally in platform or services contexts, and with an understanding of AI's capabilities in design.
• Exceptional ability to partner with Product and Engineering, influencing roadmap and systems decisions by translating technical constraints into superior customer outcomes.
• A holistic thinker who designs cohesive customer journeys that span digital products and human support, maintaining a high bar for quality and ensuring thoughtful, high-impact solutions reach customers.
• Demonstrated comfort thriving in ambiguity, leading through action, and prioritizing tangible customer impact over conceptual planning.
• A collaborative leader who brings strong opinions, engages in constructive debate, and helps teams align efficiently to advance work.
• A deep passion for Gusto's mission and a commitment to empowering small businesses through world-class financial tools.

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.

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. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.