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

This is a highly customer-facing role at the intersection of engineering, solution architecture, agentic AI, and customer delivery. You will work directly with stakeholders and own the technical discovery for our ongoing opportunities end to end. Once a deal is qualified, you scope, build, embed with the client, and build it yourself, code that holds up against real tax and jurisdiction data, not a prototype you clean up later. What you ship only counts once the client is paying for it, it's live, and it's measurably cutting the manual work they used to do by hand, hours saved, tickets deflected, risk reduced. You should be comfortable speaking with both technical and executive stakeholders, moving quickly from problem discovery to prototype, and turning complex workflows into production-ready agents and multi-agent systems.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day

Scope & Qualify: Give Sales a technical feasibility read early on ambiguous Enterprise opportunities, then own scoping the compliance challenge once the deal is sales-qualified.
Define the Problem: Own requirements gathering on complex, ambiguous opportunities, scoping the problem clearly enough for Sales, Product, and Engineering to align on it.
Prove It First: Build a working proof-of-concept of the proposed agent when a deal needs to see feasibility before committing to the full build, tailored from a hands-on integration engineer to a VP of Payroll Tax.
Make the Business Case: Translate every deployment into the business case that justifies the subscription: hours saved, risk reduced, compliance simplified.
Own the Build: Embed with clients and write the code yourself, work that runs their compliance decisions instead of just connecting to them. There's no fixed method yet, you figure out what each engagement needs and build it.
Clear the Blockers: Diagnose and fix the data issues, jurisdiction mapping, tax ID reconciliation, that stand between a client and production.
Bridge the Gap: Keep technical teams and business stakeholders aligned as requirements evolve mid-engagement, so scope changes don't blindside either side.
Own the Handoff: Deliver the build and a runbook Client Success runs solo without the need to loop back the FDE.
Close the Loop: Feed structured signal from both the sales motion and the build motion back into product and go-to-market strategy, including infrastructure gaps.
Create Implementation Playbooks: solution patterns, demo flows, and deployment documentation that make future deployments faster.

Here's what we're looking for

Demonstrated 5+ years of hands-on experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, AI Engineer, Implementation Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Consultant, or similar.
Proven track record of shipping production systems in ambiguous, client-facing environments, with demonstrable evidence of:
REST APIs, webhooks, event-driven systems, auth patterns, data modeling, idempotency, and failure modes, not just happy-path builds
Building production systems in highly regulated categories, payroll, tax, or compliance fluency deep enough to run a conversation with a client's compliance team without a translator