Lead / Manager

Gusto is on a mission to grow the small business economy, handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR for over 500,000 small businesses nationwide. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, all full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

AI Dev Tools builds the platform Gusto engineers use to work with AI, including agentic coding environments, automated AI code review, and CI/security infrastructure. In this role, you will own that platform end-to-end, from product bets on agent autonomy to infrastructure (CI systems, sandboxing, vendor contracts) and team building. This is not a traditional developer productivity management role; you will make judgment calls on agent autonomy and security posture, negotiate infrastructure vendor contracts, and set AI-spend guardrails.

• Own the agentic coding roadmap, including interactive and autonomous agent modes, entry points (Slack, web, CLI), and orchestration for multi-step/multi-repo work.
• Own agentic code review accuracy/coverage roadmap, balancing review quality, PR merge speed, and per-review inference cost.
• Set security and risk posture for autonomous coding agents, including sandboxing, permission scoping, runtime isolation, secrets handling, and blast-radius containment.
• Set and enforce AI infrastructure spend guardrails for your team.
• Lead and grow a team of senior engineers, including recruiting, mentoring, and calibration/leveling calls.
• Be a strategic partner to engineering leadership (including the CTO) on AI-native software development direction.

• 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience, including managing senior engineers through ambiguous, rapidly-changing technical problems.
• Direct, hands-on experience with agentic coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) as a daily power user.
• Experience owning a significant vendor or infrastructure contract from technical requirements through legal and procurement close.
• Comfort making autonomy/risk tradeoff calls on AI systems, understanding risks like prompt injection, credential exposure, and permission bypass.
• Track record of leading through ambiguity across multiple problem domains.
• Strong, direct communication, evidenced by briefing senior/executive stakeholders on strategy.
• Self-driven mindset, comfortable in Gusto's PE model.

Cash compensation targeted at $240,000-260,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $290,000-305,000 for San Francisco & New York. Final offers may vary. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Apply through the provided Greenhouse link.