People Partner - Product and Product Design

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.

We're looking for a high-ownership People Business Partner to support our Product and Design organizations at Gusto. This role serves as a trusted partner to leaders across some of our most cross-functional, fast-moving teams at Gusto. This role blends high-trust business partnership with hands-on execution. You'll partner with leaders through organizational changes, drive core People programs and operating rhythms, and act as the connective tissue between Product & Design and the broader People team. The leaders you'll support have strong points of view and deep context - you add value by stress-testing their thinking, then making it happen. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable analyzing data to surface a team health trend, running a clean reorg end-to-end, and building a lightweight process that makes a program actually land. This role is designed for someone who operates with high ownership, has a strong bias toward action, and earns trust with follow-through, not slide decks. We're in an active build phase - this role requires someone who arrives ready to construct, not inherit.

Gusto's People team is growing and scaling with the company! As our business scales and becomes more complex, and as we add hundreds of new Gusties each year, we need to ensure that our strategies for engagement with our employees are positive, engaging, values-driven and compliant.

• Build trusted partnerships with Product Management and Product Design leaders - understanding what's happening in their teams, surfacing friction early, and navigating performance management, promotions, leveling, and employee relations matters with good judgment.

• Synthesize People data - engagement survey, performance cycles, attrition signals, headcount trends - into clear, actionable reads for Product and Design leaders before they have to ask.

• Support and operationalize core talent programs including performance cycles, calibration discussions, promotion processes, and manager enablement.

• Reinforce high performance standards, accountability, and clarity around expectations, feedback, and growth across Product Management and Product Design.

• Serve as the liaison between Product & Design and Gusto's broader People team (Talent Acquisition, Total Rewards, L&D, People Ops), translating company-wide programs into what they mean for product and design orgs - and surfacing that context back to the center.

• When org changes are decided, own end-to-end execution - transition planning, communication sequencing, Workday updates, leader enablement, and follow-through until nothing is left