Senior Product Design Lead, Payments & Risk Platform

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:

Are you ready to elevate the design vision for how small businesses interact with their money?

As the Payments + Risk Design Lead, you’ll own end-to-end product design for some of the most complex and mission-critical systems at Gusto. This is a senior individual contributor role that blends deep hands-on design craft with cross-functional leadership.

You’ll serve as a design leader alongside two other designers on the Payments + Risk team, helping elevate craft, drive alignment, and mentor teammates through mindful feedback and proficient collaboration.

You combine systems thinking with remarkable UX and visual design skills, enabling you to craft scalable patterns, explore new interaction models, and raise the overall quality of our product experiences. You’ll shape seamless and credible money-movement experiences across Gusto’s products—ensuring reliability, security, and simplicity at scale.

About the Team:

The Payments and Risk Platform is the foundation of Gusto’s success. We ensure money moves seamlessly and securely between businesses, partners, employees, government entities, and Gusto itself.

We enable rapid and proficient money movement while protecting our platform from financial risk. Our work spans re-architecting Gusto’s core payment systems, reducing false positives in fraud detection, and building credit and debt-collection systems.

Our mandate: enable fast, reliable payment flows and protect the platform, all while delivering great experiences at scale.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

Design end-to-end product experiences across complex financial workflows as a hands-on senior IC.

Define and drive the long-term UX vision for Payments + Risk, aligned with Gusto’s strategy for money movement, trust, and risk.

Lead design strategy within your focus area, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Risk to create alignment and clarity.

Elevate the visual and interaction design quality of Payments + Risk experiences, ensuring clarity, polish, and usability.

Explore and define new UX/UI patterns for sophisticated workflows—especially where no patterns currently exist.

Evolve and maintain the design system, shaping scalable components and interaction models that support critical customer journeys.

Influence product and technical roadmaps by advocating for customer needs, design quality, and long-term system health.

Collaborate with Research to uncover and interpret user insights that inform product direction and UX strategy.

Mentor other designers through feedback, pairing, and shared problem-solving, helping raise the overall craft bar.

Contribute to Gusto’s design leadership community, shaping standards, processes, and design excellence across the organization.

Here’s what we're looking for:

8–10+ years of product design experience, including time spent in complex, technical, or large-scale product domains.

A portfolio demonstrating extraordinary UX and visual design craft, with high-quality, polished product work.

Proven ability to lead design direction, drive alignment, and influence cross-functional partners.

Experience designing for deeply technical systems, financial workflows, or other complex problem spaces.

Expertise in systems thinking, with the ability to translate complexity into clear, elegant, and scalable experiences.

Experience contributing to or evolving a design system—components, patterns, interaction models, and visual standards.

Ability to define net-new patterns and interaction models in ambiguous or emerging product areas.

Comfort operating in ambiguity while balancing long-term vision with rapid iteration and execution.

AI fluency—knowledge of tools and workflows that enhance exploration, prototyping, or operational efficiency.

A deep affinity for Gusto’s mission to empower small businesses through modern, credible financial tools.

Compensation Details

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 $172,000/yr to $215,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $202,000/yr to $253,000/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.

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