Staff Applied AI/ ML Engineer - Gusto - Colorado

At Gusto, were on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

About the role

Gusto’s AI/ML Eng team leverages our rich dataset to guide product direction and decision-making by building the right solutions at scale. We’re looking for a senior technical leader (individual contributor) who will design robust AI/ML systems and services through close partnership with seasoned leaders across Engineering, Product, Design, Data Science, Marketing, and Customer Excellence. This means you will also define the strategy along with shipping impactful models and services to evolve our AI/ML capabilities and practices.

We have several open roles across two embedded areas:

Unified Service Platform optimizes our customer experience, creates personalized engagement moments, and drives automated or AI enhanced assistance. We develop AI tools and platform components (ex. embedding algorithms) to improve performance and customer satisfaction.Growth builds AI/ML-powered experiences that drive relevant, timely product adoption. Our team enables contextual customer interactions through growth-oriented capabilities like propensity modeling and recommendations.Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day

Design and develop scalable, production-grade AI/ML models and services for complex business and customer experience problems.Lead technical strategy and architecture for key AI/ML domains, including model lifecycle, observability, safety, and evaluation.Collaborate cross-functionally to identify high-leverage AI/ML opportunities, translate them into actionable roadmaps, and deliver measurable outcomes.Build, harden,