About Gusto 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. About the Role: As a UX Researcher on the team, your work will directly inform the bets Gusto makes on future product investments.
You will partner with senior leadership, including VPs and above, bringing clarity to ambiguous, high-stakes decisions and sharpening our understanding of the customers we serve. The level of this role is the equivalent of a Senior Staff-level. Success looks like: a clear-eyed view of where our AI experiences are working or falling short, and senior executives that trust your evidence to guide where Gusto invests next.
About Design at Gusto: UX Research is part of the Design Organization at Gusto, which is made up of over 70 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We're a cross-functional bunch focused on Design, Research, Writing, Ops and Front-end Development who are always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto.
We don't care a whole lot about swim lanes and we work closely with our partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build and ship experiences that make a difference. We are passionate advocates for thoughtful, crafted, and inclusive experiences and we believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. About the Research Team: We’re a small team of researchers embedded within product areas across R&D.
Customer learning is highly valued at Gusto and we work to make sure we’re shining the light on customer understanding in the areas it’s needed the most so that critical decisions are backed by evidence. We’ve been experimenting and adopting AI in our research practice, continuing to find ways to use it to accelerate, scale, and raise the quality bar. We believe that builders across Gusto should be able to self-serve on straight-forward research questions and we build tools, resources, and programs to remove barriers to customer learning, whether that’s leveraging the research our team conducts or conducting their own. Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day: Set and drive a quantitative research roadmap across R&D, prioritizing where evidence reduces risk on our biggest product bets.
Develop psychometric frameworks, validated constructs and scales to measure how customers experience Gusto's AI features. Own Gusto's approach to quantitative methods, from evolving our org-wide survey strategy to knowing when to generalize qualitative findings at scale (e.g., MaxDiff, conjoint) and designing rigorous studies that reduce bias. Partner closely with Data Science to combine behavioral, attitudinal, and sentiment data into a coherent view of the customer, uncovering the story behind the metrics. Build and maintain clear segmentation of Gusto's ideal customer profiles, keeping it current as the business and product evolve.
Build scaled usability measurement, including large-sample benchmarking and competitive comparisons, to give teams a high-confidence read on experience and break ties