Staff Product Designer - Time Tools

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

Design at Gusto is made up of over 80 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We're a cross-functional group that is always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don't care much about swim lanes and though we care deeply about quality and craft, we are never precious about it. We work closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build, and ship experiences that make a real difference. We believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful.

We’re looking for a product designer to join our Time Tools team, a key area of growth for Gusto. As a core design contributor in this product area, you’ll partner closely with PM, Engineering, and Data peers to shape high-priority initiatives. You’ll be responsible for designing experiences that help small business owners and their employees manage time with confidence and ease.

This role offers the opportunity to own major product initiatives end-to-end—from uncovering customer needs to shipping polished, performant, and accessible experiences. You’ll collaborate with other designers on the team, contribute to our design system, and help elevate the craft quality of our product.

Time Tools is also at the forefront of how AI shows up in Gusto's products. Scheduling automation, compliance flagging, and PTO recommendations are all areas where AI outputs will increasingly inform real decisions for small business owners and hourly workers—and where getting it wrong has direct consequences. We're looking for a designer who brings a clear, considered point of view on how to design these experiences: when to surface AI, when to require human judgment, and how to communicate uncertainty in ways people can actually act on.

Time and Attendance is our flagship in a suite of add-ons designed to complement Gusto Payroll. The add-on helps small business owners track time, create and share schedules, manage attendance, and seamlessly sync hours to payroll—all within the Gusto platform. The team’s scope includes:

• Time tracking: Allow employees to log hours via web, app, or kiosk, supporting flexible work arrangements like remote and flextime.
• Scheduling: Create and manage employee schedules, accommodating shifts, availability, and shift swaps.
• Time off policies and requests: Automate time off management, support complex PTO policies, and ensure compliance with labor laws.
• PTO balances: Keep track of employee time off with automatic updates that sync vacation and sick days with payroll and calendars.
• Project tracking: Manage projects with tools for tracking time spent on tasks, analyzing progress, and adjusting workloads.

• →Define the experience framework for how small business owners and hourly workers interact with time data, including where automation should handle decisions, where humans need to stay in control, and how to surface errors without creating compliance risk.
• →Design for AI within the product itself—ideally including scheduling recommendations, PTO automation, and compliance alerts—establishing clear patterns for surfacing AI outputs, keeping humans in control of high-stakes decisions, and communicating errors in ways that protect workers and employers alike.
• →Design and refine multi-surface experiences (web, mobile, kiosk) that meet the needs of both managers and employees.
• →Partner with PM, Engineering, and Data to define problem spaces, set priorities, and deliver customer value.
• →Champion our design system and evolve it through contributions that improve platform cohesion.
• →Balance long-term vision with near-term execution, navigating ambiguity and adjusting scope as customer needs evolve.
• →Provide thoughtful critique and mentorship to peers, helping elevate craft quality across the team.

• You have 8+ years of product design experience, with a portfolio demonstrating accessible, performant, and thoughtful end-to-end design across web and mobile.
• You design with AI as a core material—prototyping recommendations, defining human override patterns, and handling failure modes responsibly. You set clear criteria for when AI-generated outputs should be trusted, surfaced, or overridden, and partner cross-functionally to establish principles for fairness, transparency, and control.
• You partner with PM and Engineering to shape priorities, translate them into clear roadmaps, and drive clarity through complex, ambiguous problem spaces.
• You uncover and synthesize customer needs—particularly for small businesses and hourly workers—into actionable design insights that inform product direction.
• You've designed complex systems or compliance-heavy workflows—ideally in SaaS, HR, or productivity tools—and can balance early-stage adoption with long-term system design.
• You scale quality through reusable patterns, thoughtful critique, and a passion for helping small businesses and their employees thrive.