Gusto, Inc. - Senior Staff Service Designer

• Credible inside a product cadence. You shape decisions from within delivery pressure, not by running parallel workshops or alignment programs. You understand how product organizations make decisions and can operate inside that rhythm. • Credible inside a product cadence. • Influence without authority. You help stakeholders see consequences and tradeoffs by creating clarity, not by pitching or evangelizing. You're comfortable when leaders decide differently than you'd recommend. You respect decision rights. • Influence without authority. • Makes the complex legible. You take a messy, multi-team service system and create representations that teams can reason about together. The artifact is a tool for shared understanding, not a deliverable to hand off. • Makes the complex legible. • Works with operational reality. You've spent meaningful time with frontline and operational teams and use that input to inform strategy. You understand that customer experience is an outcome of how business systems interact — product, business rules, frontline teams, back office ops, external constraints. • Works with operational reality. • Designs for the service implications of AI. You think through what happens when the AI gets it wrong, how uncertainty should be represented to customers, how work routes between automated and human support, and how to preserve customer agency. You treat AI not just as a workflow tool but as a delivery component that changes how the service behaves. • Designs for the service implications of AI. • Judgment under ambiguity. You move work forward when the data is incomplete, ownership is unclear, and the problem spans multiple domains. • Judgment under ambiguity. • Designs for operational sustainability. You understand that good services don’t sustain themselves. Beyond shaping the experience itself, you think about the organizational capabilities, stewardship models, and learning mechanisms needed to help teams deliver and evolve the service successfully over time. • Designs for operational sustainability. • Strong communicator. You communicate vision, concepts, and recommendations clearly to a variety of audiences including leadership, creating alignment and motivating action without jargon • Strong communicator. • 8+ years of service design experience, including meaningful work inside technology organizations alongside product, engineering, CX, and operational teams. • Experience helping teams make decisions and move work forward inside fast-moving product and operational environments. • Demonstrated ability to make complex service ecosystems understandable through maps, models, frameworks, or other working representations that stakeholders can navigate, discuss, and build on together. • Track record of influencing roadmap, operational, or investment decisions through strong judgment, clear framing, and thoughtful articulation of tradeoffs and implications. • Experience designing or operating services where AI, automation, or algorithmic systems shaped how work was delivered — including how those systems interacted with human teams and customer-facing experiences. Candidates without direct AI experience should demonstrate strong judgment about how technology changes service delivery and organizational behavior. • Experience working directly with frontline and back-office operational teams and incorporating operational realities into service and experience design work. • Understanding of how services are sustained over time through organizational capabilities such as training, workflows, ownership models, support structures, measurement, and continuous improvement. • Adjacent experience in research, analytics, systems design, operations, or human-in-the-loop services is valuable. • Experience operating inside complex scaled technology organizations is strongly preferred. • AI Fluency: • AI fluency is core to this role. We expect candidates to enter at the Integrator level on Gusto’s AI Fluency Framework, meaning AI is a regular, integrated part of how they work rather than an occasional experiment. • Integrator • For service design specifically, this includes using AI to synthesize cross-functional inputs, explore failure modes, model service behaviors, and think through operational implications such as routing, escalation, ownership, and exception handling. At this level, AI fluency also includes helping others work more effectively by sharing methods, building reusable workflows, and contributing to team capability. • The strongest candidates are building reusable tools, frameworks, prompts, workflows, or approaches that others can adopt independently. We also value discernment: the ability to evaluate AI-generated outputs critically, recognize when analysis is incomplete or misleading, and apply strong judgment rather than accepting outputs at face value. • Experience with tools such as Claude, Claude Code, or similar agentic workflows is helpful, along with comfort prototyping AI-assisted workflows and using prompt-based approaches for structured analysis. Candidates are not expected to be engineers, but should be comfortable building and experimenting with AI-enabled ways of working. • 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.