Staff / Principal

The Retirement team builds financial products and services to bridge the retirement gap for small business owners and their employees, with 401(k) plans designed to be affordable, easy to manage, and easy to understand. The team uses AI in daily workflows to move faster and explore ideas.

We're hiring a Product Designer to partner with Product, Engineering, Data, and Research to shape strategy and create a cohesive, high-trust retirement experience across the employer and employee journey. You'll operate as the design lead for your projects, co-owning priorities and success metrics, and driving alignment across Retirement and key partner teams (Payroll, Benefits, Support/Ops).

Your scope includes:

• Improving setup and account management to boost confidence, adoption, and retention.
• Creating a more connected journey between payroll and retirement by designing across the seams of product, operations, and support.
• Designing flexible, scalable patterns across Retirement, integrating with adjacent payroll and benefits touchpoints.
• Applying discerning design judgment to determine when and how to effectively incorporate AI to enhance the experience.

• Partner with Product Management to define customer problems, strategy, and measurable outcomes across activation, engagement, and retention.
• Collaborate with Data and Research to understand funnel drop-offs, behavior over time, and retention drivers, and iterate based on learnings.
• Drive the full design process for shipped experiences—scoping, prototyping, testing, and delivering MVP to longer-term improvements.
• Translate regulatory/tax-driven requirements into clear flows, content, and UI patterns that build trust.
• Craft compelling product narratives to align cross-functional stakeholders around problems, strategic options, and tradeoffs.
• Provide critique and mentorship to design peers and raise the quality bar.
• Champion the design system and contribute patterns/components.
• Use AI to move quickly from concept to customer-tested artifact, building clickable, high-fidelity prototypes.

• 8+ years in product design, with a portfolio showing end-to-end shipped work and impact.
• High bar for craft across interaction design, information architecture, and visual design—especially for complex, form-heavy workflows.
• Demonstrable AI fluency in design practice—evidence of AI changing how you prototype, test, and ship.
• Comfort moving between design and code, whether shipping UI improvements directly or working with engineers.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and shaping messy inputs into clear goals and tradeoffs.
• Systems thinker who designs solutions that scale beyond one-off screens.
• Track record leading multi-workstream initiatives across teams.
• Bonus: Experience in regulated/high-trust domains (fintech, taxes, insurance, healthcare, benefits/retirement).
• Bonus: Comfortable tackling content design aspects.
• Bonus: Have contributed to growing a design system.

Cash compensation range: $146,000/yr to $183,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $177,000/yr to $222,000/yr in San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offers are determined by multiple factors. All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.