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

This is a leadership role, empowering a team of Product Designers. And, as the first Design Leader for Gusto's Banking team, you'll lead design across two products at different stages of maturity: Wallet, a long-running, established product already helping workers manage their pay, and SMB Banking, a newer banking product for small businesses. You're bringing together an established Consumer Banking design practice with a newer Business Banking effort for the first time, building the shared rituals and practices that will connect them, while staying close enough to the craft to help both products grow.

This is a player-coach role, for now — but as Banking grows, this role's balance of hands-on craft versus people leadership will shift over time. That's why we're looking for an experienced, hands-on manager: someone who's managed before and is comfortable working as player-coach, using craft to set the bar high for the team they're growing.

About the Team

Gusto already serves over 500,000 small businesses and pays millions of their employees every month. Wallet puts your team's design decisions in front of a meaningful share of those employees directly, and SMB Banking opens the door to the 6.2 million employers in the US (98% with fewer than 100 employees) and the 550,000 new businesses started every year. Because Gusto already runs payroll for hundreds of thousands of businesses, we can design banking that's connected to pay, cash flow, and hiring from day one. You'll help invent what that looks like.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Manage an initial team of 3 designers, and hire to build your team.
• Build the rituals, hiring pipeline, and planning cadence that span both Consumer Banking and Business Banking for the first time, formalizing what already exists on Wallet and building from zero for Business Banking.
• Coach designers working at two different stages at once: one optimizing and scaling something live (Wallet), and one defining something that doesn't exist yet (SMB Banking).
• Co-create goals and success metrics with product and engineering partners for the team, translating strategy into clear scopes, sequences, and milestones.
• Raise the bar on Wallet's existing quality standard through critique and review, while defining a new standard from scratch for Business Banking.
• Stay hands-on: review and sometimes do design work directly on the highest-stakes decisions, especially on SMB Banking's path to beta, while coaching your team toward greater independence over time.
• Partner as an equal in the EPD trio with Banking's PM and engineering leads on each side, and partner regularly with Risk, Compliance, Legal, Data, and Ops given both products are regulated financial products.
• Ensure Banking's products fit cohesively into Gusto's broader financial ecosystem, coordinating with design and product counterparts on adjacent pods (like Accounting and Payments) so the customer experience feels connected across surfaces rather than fragmented by internal team boundaries.
• Build individualized career development plans with each direct report, and adapt your leadership style to the person and the moment.
• Represent Banking's design needs (headcount, quality investment, tooling) to senior design leadership.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of product design experience, including 4+ years of people management experience, ideally with senior designers or higher.
• You're an established manager who has worked as a player-coach before. Ideally you've managed designers across products at different stages, for example an established, metrics-driven product alongside a true 0-1 effort.
• Your portfolio and management track record show high-quality work in consumer or business financial products — fintech, banking, or financial platforms strongly preferred.
• Experience partnering with Risk, Compliance, or Legal on regulated financial products (KYC/KYB, identity verification, money movement rails, partner bank relationships) is a strong plus.
• You have experience incorporating AI tools and practices into how a whole design team works.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $178,000/yr to $253,000/yr in San Francisco and New York, and $147,000/yr to $215,000/yr in Denver. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.