About Gusto
At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.
About the Role:
We're looking for an engineering manager who wants to be close to the work. You'll lead a small team of engineers building at the frontier of what's possible with AI-powered professional tools — UX prototypers exploring new interaction models, founding engineers building new product lines, AI engineers designing agent systems. The right person for this role isn't looking to manage from a distance or by dashboards. You think in terms of where the bottleneck is and what the team needs right now, not in terms of operating in a fixed mode.
You don't need to be writing code every day, but you should be deeply interested in understanding the work — the technical tradeoffs, the interaction design decisions, the product bets. You should care about UX. You should care about the business. You should be the kind of manager who can look at a prototype and have a substantive opinion about it, and who can sit in an architecture discussion and push the thinking forward.
About the Team:
HR Labs is a new team inside Gusto using AI to fundamentally change how HR expertise is delivered to small businesses. We're building AI agents, intelligent automation, and novel tooling that allow a small team of HR professionals to deliver expert guidance at a scale that wasn't previously possible. This is a startup-within-a-startup — one of Gusto's largest AI bets, scaling rapidly, with the freedom to experiment across both internal and customer-facing tools.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
Here’s what we're looking for:
Preferred:
Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $200,000/yr to $247,000/yr for New York City. Stock equity is additional. 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. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.
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.
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