Senior Staff Product Designer (Payments & Risk Platform)

• 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Health and Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents. Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits. Gender-affirming care and support. A variety of mental health resources.
• Time Away: It’s important to take time away for yourself or to take care of your family. Gusto offers paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more!
• Free meals and refreshments: If you work at one of our offices, enjoy food, drinks, and snacks— on us. Conversation and community is an added bonus!
• Perks:- Expertise in systems thinking, with the ability to translate complexity into clear, elegant, and scalable experiences
• Experience designing for deeply technical systems, financial workflows, or other complex problem spaces
• Comfort operating in ambiguity while balancing long-term vision with rapid iteration and execution
• A deep affinity for Gusto’s mission to empower small businesses through modern, credible financial tools
• Experience contributing to or evolving a design system—components, patterns, interaction models, and visual standards
• AI fluency—knowledge of tools and workflows that enhance exploration, prototyping, or operational efficiency
• 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
• Ability to define net-new patterns and interaction models in ambiguous or emerging product areas
• 8–10+ years of product design experience, including time spent in complex, technical, or large-scale product domains