Staff Product Designer, Benefits

About the role

We’re hiring a Staff Product Designer for our Benefits team to design and launch a new product offering at Gusto. Our focus in Benefits is simple: help small businesses and their employees get access to better quality care at more affordable rates—in other words, we make benefits work harder for small businesses.

About the Team:

• 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.

Day-to-day responsibilities

• Lead 0→1 discovery and design for a new Benefits product offering—from problem framing to MVP definition—grounded in real employer + employee workflows.
• Design end-to-end service experiences across employer, employee, and internal ops workflows—identifying where AI can reduce complexity while keeping decisions clear and controllable.
• Design AI-assisted decision moments that help customers choose and act with confidence.
• Design the system that makes AI safe and scalable: define objects, rules, states, and exception paths plus guardrails for when AI should defer to humans.
• Make data legible and operational: shape the information model and UX so humans and AI can collaborate—clean inputs, clear outputs, and structured handoffs that reduce errors and rework.
• Build product feedback loops that improve AI quality over time: define success metrics, evaluation signals, and human-in-the-loop review patterns to continuously tune guidance, routing, and automation.
• Design in code to ship faster: use AI-assisted dev tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to prototype and deliver production-quality UI, collaborating tightly with engineering and shaping reusable patterns.

Qualifications

• You partner cross-functionally to define human-in-the-loop workflows, and set principles for fairness, privacy, and trust.
• You design with AI as a core material—prototyping, refining prompts, and integrating AI behaviors that adapt responsibly to user context. You guide teams in balancing automation with transparency and control.
• You redesign service blueprints where AI plays an active role—automating routine workflows, predicting needs, and escalating complex cases to humans with transparency and context.
• You define area strategy using measurable bets and experimentation; partner with Analytics and AI teams to track and evaluate impact.
• You scale quality through reusable patterns, thoughtful critique, and mentorship; balance exploration with delivery.
• You influence cross-functional strategy across teams; resolve complex trade-offs and guide design through ambiguity.
• You coach across teams, build onboarding and training programs, and raise the bar for craft and systems thinking.

What we offer

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.