Staff Product Designer, Core Experiences

About the team
Product Design at Gusto is made up of over 60 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don’t care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. Read more about Design at Gusto.

About the opportunity

Gusto is at a meaningful inflection point in our scale. We are launching a native mobile app experience for small business owners, and scaling a platform that other teams will use to solve small business problems.  

As a staff designer and design lead for our Member Lifecycle, Core Experiences team, you will play a critical leadership role in the strategy and execution of our vision for team member onboarding, offboarding, and all “people-related information” exposed throughout Gusto’s experience. As a platform design leader, you will collaborate closely with your cross-functional partners and internal feature teams to design and build a seamless and holistic experience for Gusto admins and employees. As a member of the Core Experiences design team, you will contribute to craft quality and leadership across the team, and help set the direction for how platform designers should collaborate with feature teams.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Work with cross-functional partners in Product Management, Engineering, and Data Science to understand customer problems, key opportunities in your domain, and define both the long term UX vision and also short term releases that unlock customer value.
• Collaborate with internal teams to understand common customer and business needs, and crafting patterns and systems that meet those needs
• Work with engineering partners to assess downstream impact to the customer experience through data modeling and architecture decisions
• Advocate for great UX, inspiring your teams with a strong point of view about what’s possible and aspirational for your product area.
• Hold high standards for the customer experience, including partnering with engineering partners to refine the end customer experience and ensure that what we release is bug free, performant, accessible, and responsive.
• Design for how your experience fits into our system and advocate for cohesive experiences through the use of Workbench, our Design System
• Speak clearly to tradeoffs and the “Why” behind design decisions in terms non-designers can understand and participate in
• Provide and seek feedback from other designers to always push the bar for quality.
• Collaborate with designers on other teams to develop cohesive solutions for shared problems.
• You’ll drive team-wide impact through mentorship, fostering a culture of growth and collaboration. 

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• 8+ years' aligned Product Design experience, ideally with a few years of platform experience
• Bonus for Gusto if you’ve worked in domains connected to Platform design, Notifications/Communications, Permissions, or Compliance
• A builder who loves being hands on crafting high quality, high impact solutions and getting them in front of customers.
• Experience designing and shipping products in complex domains informed by research, data, and insights from support teams demonstrated through a portfolio of work you’ve directly contributed to.
• Systems thinking, including using and contributing to a Design System and designing with a Platform-first approach.
• Ability to explain the impact of your work, tradeoffs you’ve made, lessons learned, and design rationale. 
• The ability to think long term towards a broader vision or step change, while being able to speak to scoping and sequencing to deliver iterative value.
• Experience balancing long-term design goals with an Agile-based iterative approach. 
• Strong communication skills and enthusiasm for collaborating across the entire company.
• Experience designing end-to-end customer journeys from software to service
• Strong understanding of common web patterns, foundations, and the ability to discern when to innovate versus adopt existing standards.
• Strong opinions loosely held and a willingness to engage in constructive debates about scope and tradeoffs to build alignment and unblock work.
• Strong UX craft — you can break down complex experiences and design with consideration for all touchpoints. 
• Ability to embrace ambiguous situations as opportunities to create.
• Passion for Gusto’s mission and the impact we can have on the world.

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 $147,000/yr to $199,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $179,000/yr to $221,000/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.

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. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected].