Gusto

Overview

As a Staff Product Engineer on Growth Onboarding, you'll own the experience that turns curious signups into activated, thriving customers — taking friction out of getting started and meeting customers wherever they are, from the web to SMS, WhatsApp, and third-party AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude — working full-stack and cross-functionally as both a product builder and a founder.

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the pe

Requirements & Eligibility

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including building and shipping customer-facing products at scale.
• A product-minded engineer who starts from the customer problem and the metric that matters, not just the ticket — and who can operate independently across product, design, and data partners.
• Demonstrated ability to move fast and execute with high quality: someone who ships, measures, and iterates rather than waiting for perfect certainty.
• Experience applying AI/LLM capabilities to real product problems — with the judgment to know where it adds value and where it adds noise — and a habit of using AI tools to work more effectively.
• A founder mindset: high ownership, comfort with ambiguity and greenfield

Key Responsibilities

• Own meaningful slices of the signup-to-activation experience end to end — from data model to UI — and ship measurable improvements to how quickly and reliably new customers get up and running.
• Invent and prototype net-new, 0-to-1 experiences — bringing your own ideas for how AI can reimagine onboarding, not just implementing a spec handed to you.
• Partner directly with Product, Design, and Data to frame problems, form hypotheses, and validate them with real customers in weeks, not quarters.
• Identify where AI meaningfully removes customer effort (and where a simple form is better), and build those experiences thoughtfully into the flow.
• Design onboarding as modular, reusable building blocks so new entry points into Gusto can be added quickly without rebuilding the foundation.
• Raise the engineering bar through pragmatic technical direction, high-quality code, strong reviews, and mentoring engineers around you.
• Make sharp scoping calls under a time box — shipping the simplest version that proves or disproves an idea, then iterating.