Senior Staff UX Researcher

What Design is like at Gusto:

Product Design at Gusto is a team of over 70 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We’re a cross-functional group spanning Design, Research, Service Design, Content, Ops, and Front-end Development, focused on building understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto.

We don’t get caught up in swim lanes. We work closely with partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build, and ship experiences that truly make a difference. We're passionate about thoughtful, inclusive design, and we believe great experiences can make hard things not only possible—but delightful.

About the teams

Pay Group, Benefits, and HR Experiences teams build the core workflows for over 400k small businesses that choose Gusto to manage their teams. As a Sr. Staff UX Researcher, you'll lead research strategy for the largest product areas at Gusto. You’ll partner with Design and Product senior leaders to define direction and shape roadmaps grounded in customer needs. Working across pods, you’ll influence product strategy and ensure we're delivering high quality experiences that make the work of running a business disappear for our customers.

You’ll help shape the evolving Research practice and culture at Gusto, scale research practices, and empower cross-functional teams to take on lightweight research through democratization efforts. As a key partner to Design, Engineering, Data, and PM, you’ll bring strong leadership and uphold a high bar for research quality. This is a high-impact role, ideal for someone excited to lead research at scale and elevate the craft across a platform team.

About the opportunity

You’ll report to Gusto’s Head of UX Research and Design Operations, and partner closely with Design, Content Design, Service Design, PMs, Data Science, Legal, Marketing, and Engineering. You’ll lead research throughout the product lifecycle, owning a research roadmap aligned with strategic priorities.

Your insights will help connect business goals with real customer needs—powering decisions that shape products and services for millions of small businesses and their employees. Your work will amplify our customer-centric mindset and help evolve the business and product strategy for Gusto as a whole.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Shape strategic research direction. Build and evolve a research roadmap aligned to business priorities, spanning multiple product areas and levels of ambiguity. Partner closely with Product, Data, Design, and Engineering leadership.

• Lead high-impact research. Independently conduct complex generative and evaluative studies that uncover unmet needs, inform product vision, and de-risk decisions at scale.

• Influence cross-org priorities. Identify patterns and connections across teams. Ensure insights cascade and inform decisions across teams and timelines. Partner with senior leadership to identify and evangelize the highest-impact opportunities for our customers.

• Advance AI-native practices. Explore and embed AI tools into research workflows to enhance speed, quality, and impact. Help define what it means to work AI-natively across research internally and for our customers.

• Mentor and multiply. Coach peers and cross-functional teammates. Develop tools, templates, and guidance that scale research craft and impact.

• Drive research rigor and storytelling. Craft compelling, actionable narratives tailored to executive and stakeholder audiences. Bring clarity and urgency to insights.

Elevate customer understanding. Collaborate with cross-functional partners to connect insights and build a holistic view of the customer journey.

• Advance research influence and scale. Partner with Design Ops to evolve scalable methods, workflows, and systems. Pilot and champion new tools and practices.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 10+ years of user research experience, with a record of leading high-impact, strategic work

• Deep expertise in UX research methods, with the judgment to select and adapt the right approach to the problem

• Skilled in mixed methods, and experienced across end-to-end journeys, from digital experiences to service touchpoints

• Demonstrated experience influencing product direction across multiple teams through your insights and opinions. We’re looking for a research leader that stays deeply connected with the product.

• Strong communicator and systems thinker, able to synthesize complexity and drive alignment across disciplines

• Thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous environments; proactive, detail-oriented, and able to operate with autonomy

• Demonstrated success in mentoring others, democratizing research, and embedding customer connection into team culture and rituals

• Curious and opinionated about emerging tools, including AI, with a drive to evolve how research is done

• Mission-driven, with genuine empathy for small business owners and a desire to improve their lives through thoughtful product development

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.