Staff Applied AI/ ML Engineer

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

About the role

Gusto’s AI/ML Eng team leverages our rich dataset to guide product direction and decision-making by building the right solutions at scale. We’re looking for a senior technical leader (individual contributor) who will design robust AI/ML systems and services through close partnership with seasoned leaders across Engineering, Product, Design, Data Science, Marketing, and Customer Excellence. This means you will also define the strategy along with shipping impactful models and services to evolve our AI/ML capabilities and practices.

We have several open roles across two embedded areas:

• Unified Service Platform optimizes our customer experience, creates personalized engagement moments, and drives automated or AI enhanced assistance. We develop AI tools and platform components (ex. embedding algorithms) to improve performance and customer satisfaction.
• Growth builds AI/ML-powered experiences that drive relevant, timely product adoption. Our team enables contextual customer interactions through growth-oriented capabilities like propensity modeling and recommendations.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day

• Design and develop scalable, production-grade AI/ML models and services for complex business and customer experience problems.
• Lead technical strategy and architecture for key AI/ML domains, including model lifecycle, observability, safety, and evaluation.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to identify high-leverage AI/ML opportunities, translate them into actionable roadmaps, and deliver measurable outcomes.
• Build, harden, and operate platform capabilities that power customer journey experiences (e.g., personalization, assistance, routing, content selection).
• Stay current with the latest AI/ML research; prototype, evaluate, and productionize new algorithms and techniques from academia and industry.
• Establish robust practices for validation, deployment, monitoring, explainability, and ongoing performance management.
• Communicate findings, roadmaps, tradeoffs, and impact clearly to executives and non-technical partners.
• Mentor engineers and scientists, fostering a culture of technical excellence and pragmatic innovation.

Here’s what we’re looking for

• 8+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying end-to-end AI/ML systems in industry or academia.
• Deep expertise in one or more advanced ML areas (e.g., supervised/unsupervised learning, deep learning, NLP, LLMs, retrieval/RAG, reinforcement learning). 
• Our Growth positions would require a background in growth-oriented solutions (e.g., propensity scoring, recommendation systems, forecasting, lead scoring) and experimentation.
• Proven track record delivering large, impactful AI/ML projects into production environments with measurable business and customer impact. 
• Experience monitoring AI agents with an attention to safety/guardrails, evaluation frameworks, and sentiment/quality analysis is necessary for the Unified Service Platform roles but not required for our Growth positions.
• Proficiency with modern ML frameworks and tooling (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) and cloud platforms (e.g., GCP, AWS, or Azure). 
• Hands-on experience building LLM-based applications and agentic AI workflows (e.g., Claude, Gemini, OpenAI), including prompt/retrieval design and evaluation, is a bonus.
• Strong programming skills in Python and sound software engineering fundamentals (testing, code review, CI/CD, reliability).
• Demonstrated leadership in cross-disciplinary settings and the ability to influence direction through technical depth and clarity.
• Excellent communication skills and strong product/business judgment.
• Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field is a plus.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $230k-280k for San Francisco, New York, and Seattle $205k - 255k in Los Angeles, $185k-234k in Denver, and 200k-250k CAD for Toronto. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas. 

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto. 

Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

Gusto takes security and protection of your personal information very seriously. Please review our Fraudulent Activity Disclaimer.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your Gusto application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.