Head of Engineering, AI Platform

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.

All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

at Gusto

San Francisco, CA

Gusto is building AI agents that help small business owners get work done, whether by working alongside them or by automating their work entirely. AI Platform is the group that builds those agents and the underlying platform they run on, which other teams across Gusto also use to build agents of their own.

We're looking for someone to lead the whole group: an organization of around 25 engineers, together with the managers who run each area. The platform is already in production and running a growing number of agents, so much of the work now is scaling it. That means helping the teams settle into their charters, working out what the shared platform should own versus what product teams build for themselves, and keeping the group's direction aligned with Gusto's broader AI strategy. There is considerable room for the group to grow from here.

AI Platform builds Gusto's agents and the platform they run on, along with the AI features customers use directly. One team owns the shared layer: it connects Gusto's products to the models, runs multi-step agent workflows reliably, and provides the model gateway, the tool and MCP registry, and the evaluation and observability tooling, so that any team can build an agent without recreating the same groundwork each time. It is built on LangGraph and the Vercel AI SDK. The other teams build the customer-facing agents on top of that platform, some working directly with customers and others running in the background to automate work on their behalf.

It's already a highly cross-functional group, with product managers, designers, and data scientists working as part of the team alongside the engineers. It partners with product