Staff Product Designer, Benefits

Title: Staff Product Designer, Benefits Location: San Francisco, CA

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 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.

Benefits is a notoriously complex space, full of confusing choices, high stakes, and fragmented experiences across employers, employees, carriers, and brokers. In this role, you’ll partner closely with Product Managers, Engineers, Data Science, CX, Operations, and Sales to turn that complexity into experiences that feel clear, human, and trustworthy—from end-to-end journeys to the underlying systems that power them.

This is an opportunity to shape a new part of Gusto’s Benefits offering and deliver meaningful, tangible impact for small businesses and the people who rely on them.

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:

• 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.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 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.

At Gusto, we strive to provide rewards that empower employees to achieve their financial and personal goals. We offer competitive compensation packages with a strong emphasis on equity based compensation (ownership in Gusto). To learn more about Gusto’s compensation philosophy and benefits offerings please view our Total Rewards Approach page.

Our cash compensation range for this role is $146,000/yr to $183,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $177,000/yr to $222,000/yr in San Francisco, Seattle & 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. 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.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.