Principal Applied AI Scientist

About Gusto

Gusto is looking for a Principal Applied AI Scientist to join our AI team and build out our Generative AI capabilities.

About the Role:

We’re looking to accelerate AI investments across the business to solve customer pain points, and are growing our Applied AI team. You’ll be a part of the core group of experts exploring big, innovative bets, quickly prototyping solutions and shipping to customers. You're also responsible for quickly iterating on improvements and eventually scaling to production-grade AI applications. You’ll be working alongside a multidisciplinary group of Product Engineers, PMs, and Design.

In this role, you’ll be responsible for designing, building, evaluating, and shipping products that use proprietary and open source LLMs. You’ll be responsible for all aspects of the AI development lifecycle: framing the problem, designing the system, making decisions on frameworks, building, evaluation, and deploying. As an Applied AI Scientist, you’ll own the customer impact end-to-end.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, develop and deploy innovative AI solutions
• Experiment with multi-agent frameworks to build autonomous systems
• Improve LLMs through pre-training, fine-turning, and RLHF
• Build evaluation for LLMs and LLM based products, and assess best methods required to build LLMs suited for purpose
• Collaborate with the engineering team to determine technical requirements and SLAs for API-enabled services
• Research novel AI techniques and strategies that create magical customer experiences

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 8+ years experience designing, evaluating, and productionizing AI applications.
  • Experience with Agentic AI frameworks (LangGraph and Llama-Index) and experience building, deploying and maintaining LLM-based applications in production are essential
• Demonstrated expertise in writing production-level Python code
• Proven ability to design and prototype AI solutions quickly
• Experience working on multi-agent AI systems to automate end to end workflows

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $191,000-$237,000/year in Denver, Chicago, and Atlanta, $208,000-$258,000/year in Los Angeles and Seattle, and $225,000-$279,000/year for San Francisco and 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.