Senior Design Manager - Payments & Risk Platform
About the Role:
Are you ready to lead and elevate the design vision for how small businesses interact with their money?
As a Senior Design Manager on Gusto’s Payments and Risk Platform, you will lead a small team of designers while also contributing directly as an individual contributor (“player/coach”). You’ll shape seamless, credible money transition experiences across all of Gusto’s products—ensuring reliability, security, and simplicity at scale.
You’ll collaborate closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, and Risk to define the vision, guide execution, and set a high bar for design quality. This role combines hands-on design work with people leadership—empowering, mentoring, and developing two other designers on the team.
About the Team:
The Payments and Risk Platform is the foundation to Gusto’s success. We ensure money moves seamlessly and securely between businesses, partners, employees, government entities, and Gusto itself.
We're devoted to both enabling rapid, proficient money movement and securing our platform against financial fraud and risk. This involves a complete re-architecture of Gusto's core payments platform to transition money faster and more proficiently than ever before, fostering growth for Gusto and our customers alike. Our job is to keep our platform safe. We aim to provide great experiences while preventing fraud on Gusto. We also work to improve at spotting false warnings, and to build credit check and debt collection systems.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
Lead, coach, and develop a team of two designers, fostering growth, craft excellence, and proficient cross-functional collaboration.
Contribute directly to end-to-end product design work as an active IC—delivering high-impact experiences within complex financial systems.
Define and drive a long-term UX vision that integrates with Gusto’s broader strategy for money movement, trust, and risk.
Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to influence roadmap development, system design, and prioritization decisions.
Collaborate with Research to uncover user insights that inform product direction.
Champion consistency and quality across the Payments and Risk design system, ensuring scalable and reliable experiences.
Contribute to Gusto’s product design leadership community—sharing insights, setting standards, and shaping our overall design excellence.
Here’s what we're looking for:
8–10+ years of product design experience, including 1–2+ years of management or formal mentorship experience leading small design teams.
Proven ability to deliver high-quality design outcomes in complex, technical product areas.
Robust systems thinking and ability to translate complex problems into elegant, scalable experiences.
Demonstrated experience partnering proficiently with Product and Engineering to align vision and execution.
Comfortable operating in ambiguity and balancing strategic vision with execution swiftness.
A collaborative leader who gives clear feedback, fosters alignment, and helps teams deliver customer impact.
AI fluency: Knowledge of AI tools or workflows that enhance design exploration, prototyping, or operational efficiency, and curiosity about emerging AI capabilities in product design.
Deep affinity for Gusto’s mission to empower small businesses through world-class 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.
About the job
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Senior Design Manager - Payments & Risk Platform
About the Role:
Are you ready to lead and elevate the design vision for how small businesses interact with their money?
As a Senior Design Manager on Gusto’s Payments and Risk Platform, you will lead a small team of designers while also contributing directly as an individual contributor (“player/coach”). You’ll shape seamless, credible money transition experiences across all of Gusto’s products—ensuring reliability, security, and simplicity at scale.
You’ll collaborate closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, and Risk to define the vision, guide execution, and set a high bar for design quality. This role combines hands-on design work with people leadership—empowering, mentoring, and developing two other designers on the team.
About the Team:
The Payments and Risk Platform is the foundation to Gusto’s success. We ensure money moves seamlessly and securely between businesses, partners, employees, government entities, and Gusto itself.
We're devoted to both enabling rapid, proficient money movement and securing our platform against financial fraud and risk. This involves a complete re-architecture of Gusto's core payments platform to transition money faster and more proficiently than ever before, fostering growth for Gusto and our customers alike. Our job is to keep our platform safe. We aim to provide great experiences while preventing fraud on Gusto. We also work to improve at spotting false warnings, and to build credit check and debt collection systems.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
Lead, coach, and develop a team of two designers, fostering growth, craft excellence, and proficient cross-functional collaboration.
Contribute directly to end-to-end product design work as an active IC—delivering high-impact experiences within complex financial systems.
Define and drive a long-term UX vision that integrates with Gusto’s broader strategy for money movement, trust, and risk.
Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to influence roadmap development, system design, and prioritization decisions.
Collaborate with Research to uncover user insights that inform product direction.
Champion consistency and quality across the Payments and Risk design system, ensuring scalable and reliable experiences.
Contribute to Gusto’s product design leadership community—sharing insights, setting standards, and shaping our overall design excellence.
Here’s what we're looking for:
8–10+ years of product design experience, including 1–2+ years of management or formal mentorship experience leading small design teams.
Proven ability to deliver high-quality design outcomes in complex, technical product areas.
Robust systems thinking and ability to translate complex problems into elegant, scalable experiences.
Demonstrated experience partnering proficiently with Product and Engineering to align vision and execution.
Comfortable operating in ambiguity and balancing strategic vision with execution swiftness.
A collaborative leader who gives clear feedback, fosters alignment, and helps teams deliver customer impact.
AI fluency: Knowledge of AI tools or workflows that enhance design exploration, prototyping, or operational efficiency, and curiosity about emerging AI capabilities in product design.
Deep affinity for Gusto’s mission to empower small businesses through world-class 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.