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Salary: USD 179,000 - 260,000 / annual
Gusto is a mission-driven fintech company serving over 500,000 small businesses with payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR solutions. The company has 2,700+ employees across the US, Canada, Mexico, and Turkey, with over $500M in annual revenue.
As Principal Product Manager for Payroll Platform, you will own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Gusto's payroll platform infrastructure. This is a high-impact role on a lean team where you'll shape the APIs and shared systems that enable internal teams and external partners to build on top of payroll capabilities.
Key responsibilities include:
- Define the payroll platform vision and strategy, deciding what belongs in the shared platform versus what teams build on top, including API contracts, common pay-input interfaces, and system boundaries.
- Drive adoption of the platform by internal teams, partners, and AI agents. Define and track metrics around adoption, reliability, error rates, and connect them to customer outcomes like fewer payroll errors and reduced time spent on payroll preparation.
- Lead cross-functional collaboration with engineering, design, data, and compliance teams. Partner with consuming teams to make speed-versus-safety trade-offs explicit and ensure cohesive product experience.
- Build a unified payroll API and lead migrations of existing users and systems onto it, making it easier to support different worker types and new ways to pay people.
- Define payroll actions, controls, audit trails, and evaluations that enable AI agents to work safely. Prototype and test with AI, expanding agent autonomy as evidence supports it.
Gusto emphasizes AI fluency across all roles. The product team is lean and empowered, with intentionally blurred role boundaries. PMs prototype, automate, design, and ship using AI as a co-builder. The culture is mission-driven, focused on lifting up small business owners and building AI-first technology.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of direct Product Management experience
- Experience owning a platform, API, or developer product that other teams or partners built on, with demonstrated ability to drive adoption
- Technical fluency in APIs, data models, and system design; experience leading migrations to new APIs or interfaces with credibility among senior engineers
- Strong platform judgment to decide what shared systems should and shouldn't do, making thoughtful choices about contracts and difficult-to-reverse decisions
- Experience designing for trust in systems where errors have real consequences, including clear controls, auditability, and evidence-based automation expansion
- Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agents, including tool design and evaluations; ability to use AI to prototype and ship, explaining choices and trade-offs
- Experience leading multi-team work across engineering, design, and data, connecting platform metrics to customer outcomes
- Payroll, payments, tax, or fintech experience is a plus but not required
