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Salary: USD 179,000 - 260,000 / annual
Gusto is a mission-driven HR and payroll platform serving over 500,000 small businesses. The CoreX AI team is building conversational AI experiences that embed directly into small business workflows, handling tasks like payroll, benefits, and HR decisions where accuracy and trust are critical.
In this Principal Product Manager role, you will lead the product vision and strategy for Gusto's conversational assistant. You'll define how the assistant works, behaves, and earns customer trust while enabling small businesses to get real work done across payroll, benefits, HR, and beyond.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop deep understanding of small business workflows within Gusto—where they get stuck, what work they'd delegate if they could, and how to unlock value through AI
- Lead the product vision for the conversational assistant and translate it into coherent strategy, with sharp perspective on where the assistant delivers real value and what to build first
- Expand the assistant's capabilities by partnering with domain teams to grow tool and domain coverage across payroll, time, benefits, and compliance, measured by real customer actions completed
- Define how Gusto shows up in customers' ecosystems—third-party connectors, messaging channels, AI clients—and prioritize surfaces where work naturally happens
- Partner with engineering and data teams on technical trade-offs: API design, MCP layer exposure, embedding in first-party surfaces, and strategic technical debt decisions
- Collaborate with design and UXR to understand customer sentiment about AI acting on their behalf and shape product accordingly
- Move fast by shipping narrow slices that deliver early customer value rather than waiting for complete builds
Gusto operates lean product teams with high autonomy and impact. You'll work across the company, reason about both API design and customer experience, and use AI as a co-builder to prototype, automate, and ship solutions. The role is fluid and expanding—this isn't a static roadmap given the pace of AI development and competitive landscape.
Gusto has offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. Hybrid employees are expected to work from the office 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of product management experience, with demonstrated ownership of meaningful scope and broad product or platform-level decisions
- Comfortable in high-visibility roles engaging directly with Gusto leadership and driving decisions that stick
- Belief in AI's potential for small businesses and genuine excitement to build it
- Understanding of trusted AI product development: writing evals, holding strong perspectives on AI quality, and owning responsibility for products customers rely on daily
- Hands-on approach—prefer building to delegating, and thrive in a culture that expects it
- Ability to span both platform thinking and UX/experience judgment within the same role
- Sharp perspectives on AI product systems: RAG, ontology, and scalable API strategy for agent-accessible systems
- Comfort with fluid, expanding charters in a fast-moving AI landscape
