Senior Staff Service Designer

About the role

A customer running payroll doesn't experience "the product," "CX," and "AI" as separate things. They experience one service made up of many teams, systems, and handoffs working together. When those handoffs are well designed, the experience holds up. When they aren't - when it's unclear who owns an escalation, what happens when the AI gets something wrong, or how an exception moves between systems and teams - the customer absorbs the cost. As AI becomes a larger part of the customer experience, the design challenge changes. More of the experience now depends on how work moves between AI systems, product experiences, and human teams. This role focuses on making those interactions more coherent, resilient, and understandable, both for customers and for the teams operating the service behind the scenes. You'll join a team that's already operating with strong executive support and an active body of work across onboarding, escalation design, journey measurement, and AI-enabled service delivery. This is the second IC hire on a foundational team growing from two to three during a major shift toward AI-enabled service experiences. What makes this role different from many service design roles is that you'll be building with AI, not just designing around it. The team is prototyping AI-assisted workflows that help product and operational teams think through servicing implications earlier in the development process so that questions like "what happens if this breaks?" and "where does the customer go next?" get addressed during planning, not discovered later through operational failure. Design at Gusto is made up of over 80 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We're a cross-functional group that is always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don't care much about swim lanes and though we care deeply about quality and craft, we are never precious about it. We work closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build, and ship experiences that make a real difference. We believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful. We are building an AI-native design organization - and we mean that seriously. We're looking for designers who are already working this way: using AI to prototype ideas quickly, shorten customer feedback loops, and ship quality UX directly to customers. This isn't a future aspiration - it's how we work now, and it's changing what the design role looks like at Gusto and across the industry. Here's what you'll do day-to-day: Complex customer journeys where coordination matters most. Cross-cutting journeys where outcomes depend on coordination across people, systems, operations, and AI - and where breakdowns are costly. The work includes understanding how these journeys operate today, shaping the intended service experience, identifying the operational capabilities needed to deliver it sustainably, improving how work routes between teams and systems, and establishing how journey health is measured over time. AI-assisted service design workflows. Building tools and workflows that help product and operational teams think through service implications before launch: What happens if something fails? How does escalation work? Where does the customer go next? How will teams know whether the experience is performing well? Distributed practice enablement. Helping adjacent practitioners - including product designers, product operations managers, and process improvement analysts - apply service design methods in their own domains through reusable tools, guidance, training, and support. Cross-journey coordination and learning. Helping teams work from shared patterns and operating assumptions so customers experience Gusto as a coordinated service rather than disconnected systems. This includes identifying recurring failure patterns, shaping reusable approaches, and improving how