Senior Staff Service Designer

About Gusto At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve. 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. About the Role: A customer running payroll doesn’t experience “the product,” “CX,” and “AI” as separate things. They experience one service made up of many teams, systems, and handoffs working together. When those handoffs are well designed, the experience holds up. When they aren’t — when it’s unclear who owns an escalation, what happens when the AI gets something wrong, or how an exception moves between systems and teams — the customer absorbs the cost. As AI becomes a larger part of the customer experience, the design challenge changes. More of the experience now depends on how work moves between AI systems, product experiences, and human teams. This role focuses on making those interactions more coherent, resilient, and understandable, both for customers and for the teams operating the service behind the scenes. You’ll join a team that’s already operating with strong executive support and an active body of work across onboarding, escalation design, journey measurement, and AI-enabled service delivery. This is the second IC hire on a foundational team growing from two to three during a major shift toward AI-enabled service experiences. What makes this role different from many service design roles is that you’ll be building with AI, not just designing around it. The team is prototyping AI-assisted workflows that help product and operational teams think through servicing implications earlier in the development process so that questions like “what happens if this breaks?” and “where does the customer go next?” get addressed during planning, not discovered later through operational failure. 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. Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day: Complex customer journeys where coordination matters most. Cross-cutting journeys where outcomes depend on coordination across people, systems, operations, and AI — and where breakdowns are costly. The work includes understanding how these journeys operate today, shaping the intended service experience, identifying the operational capabilities needed to deliver it sustainably, imp