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Salary: USD 225,000 - 250,000 / annual
Gusto is rebuilding its financial planning, forecasting, and analysis (FP&A) function with AI at the center. As Staff FP&A AI Architect, you will design and lead the technical and process architecture that transforms FP&A from a manual, spreadsheet-driven cycle into an automated, insight-generating function. This is a new role on the Enterprise AIT team, which drives intelligent transformation of Gusto's enterprise systems by integrating AI, automation, and advanced analytics across internal applications.
You will partner closely with the CFO organization, FP&A, Accounting, Data, and Engineering teams. Your responsibilities include:
• Define the multi-year architecture and roadmap for AI-enabled planning, forecasting, and reporting, prioritizing use cases by value, feasibility, and risk.
• Architect driver-based, ML-assisted forecasts for revenue, headcount, opex, and cash, combining statistical models with LLM workflows and benchmarking against human forecasts.
• Build agentic workflows for variance commentary, flux analysis, scenario modeling, board and QBR narratives, and ad-hoc analytical questions.
• Own the finance data foundation by working with Data Engineering on governed data models connecting the GL, billing, CRM, HRIS, and planning tools, ensuring AI outputs are traceable and auditable.
• Establish evals, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, lineage, and audit trails that meet SOX, security, and privacy requirements.
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions across planning platforms, LLM providers, and orchestration frameworks.
• Mentor analysts and engineers, create reusable patterns and templates, and drive AI adoption across Finance.
• Report on cycle-time reduction, forecast accuracy, analyst capacity freed, and decision latency.
You are a hybrid professional: deep enough in finance to understand driver-based planning, variance analysis, and board reporting, and deep enough in data and AI to design the systems that automate them. You excel at explaining model behavior to a CFO and system design to an engineer.
Gusto serves more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide, handling payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR. The company has teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. Hybrid employees in San Francisco are expected to work from the office approximately 2-3 days per week.
REQUIREMENTS:
Required:
• 10+ years in FP&A, corporate finance, finance systems, data science, or finance engineering, including 3+ years designing or leading AI/ML or advanced automation for finance
• Strong FP&A fundamentals: driver-based modeling, operating plans, rolling forecasts, SaaS or fintech metrics, variance analysis
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic systems (prompting, RAG, tool use, evals) and classical forecasting (time series, regression, ensembles)
• Proficiency in SQL and Python, a modern data stack (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, dbt), and BI tools
• Experience with enterprise planning platforms and ERP/GL systems
• Track record shipping production-grade solutions under SOX, data governance, and security review
• Exceptional communication skills
Nice to have:
• Payroll, HR tech, fintech, or SaaS finance experience
• Experience building internal tools with Engineering
• Familiarity with MCP-style integrations and AI governance frameworks
• CPA, CFA, or an advanced quantitative degree
