About the company
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.
Responsibilities
- Own the agentic coding roadmap. Set direction for interactive and autonomous agent modes, entry points (Slack, web, CLI), and the orchestration model for multi-step/multi-repo agent work.
- Agentic code review. Own its accuracy/coverage roadmap, and make the real tradeoff calls between review quality, PR merge speed, and per-review inference cost — backed by data, not vibes.
- Set the security and risk posture for autonomous coding agents at Gusto. Decide what an agent can do unsupervised, own the sandboxing/permission-scoping model, and drive the underlying hardening (runtime isolation, secrets handling, blast-radius containment) needed to run agent workloads safely.
- Set and enforce AI infrastructure spend guardrails for your team, translating raw usage data into judgment calls about what's legitimate cost of doing the job vs. what needs a conversation.
- Lead and grow a team of senior engineers working across ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces — recruit, mentor, run the hiring loop, and make calibration/leveling calls you can defend.
- Be a direct strategic partner to engineering leadership (including the CTO) on where AI-native software development is heading at Gusto, grounded in what's actually shippable, not vendor hype.
Requirements
- 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience, including managing senior engineers through ambiguous, rapidly-changing technical problems (not just well-scoped roadmap execution).
- Direct, hands-on experience with agentic coding tools — you are a daily power user of Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent, not someone who has read about them.
- Experience owning a significant vendor or infrastructure contract from technical requirements through legal and procurement close.
- Comfort making autonomy/risk tradeoff calls on AI systems without a dedicated security team making the call for you — you understand the shape of the risk (e.g., prompt injection, credential exposure, permission bypass) well enough to scope it yourself.
- Track record of leading through ambiguity across more than one nominally separate problem domain at once.
- Strong, direct communication — evidenced by briefing senior/executive stakeholders on strategy (not just status) and getting real decisions out of those conversations.
- Self-driven mindset, comfortable in Gusto's PE model: your job is removing roadblocks and setting direction, not command-and-control management.
Conditions
- Cash compensation: $240,000-260,000 in Denver & most remote locations, and $290,000-305,000 for San Francisco & New York.
- Hybrid work: Employees based in Denver, San Francisco, or New York City will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role).
- All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs).