Head of Engineering, AI Platform
Gusto · San Francisco, CA - Hybrid
About this role
**Head of Engineering, AI Platform** **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). 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 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** Gusto is building AI agents that help small business owners get work done—whether by working alongside them or by automating their work entirely. The **AI Platform** group builds those agents and the underlying platform they run on, which other teams across Gusto also use to build agents of their own. We’re looking for someone to lead the whole group: an organization of around **25 engineers**, together with the managers who run each area. The platform is already in production and running a growing number of agents, so much of the work now is **scaling it**—including helping teams settle into their charters, defining what the shared platform should own vs. what product teams build, and keeping the group’s direction aligned with Gusto’s broader AI strategy. **About the Team** AI Platform builds Gusto’s agents and the platform they run on, along with the AI features customers use directly. - One team owns the shared layer: it connects Gusto’s products to the models, runs multi-step agent workflows reliably, and provides the model gateway, tool and MCP registry, plus evaluation and observability tooling—so any team can build an agent without recreating the same groundwork. - The shared platform is built on **LangGraph** and the **Vercel AI SDK**. - Other teams build customer-facing agents on top of that platform—some working directly with customers and others running in the background to automate work on their behalf. The group is highly cross-functional, with product managers, designers, and data scientists working alongside engineers. It partners with product and AI/ML science teams across Gusto and reports to the **Head of Engineering, Core Experiences**. **What you’ll do (day-to-day)** - Lead the group’s technical strategy for building agents that assist and automate work for small business owners, ensuring they’re built on a platform other teams can use. - Set the technical direction and roadmap, including ongoing decisions about what the shared platform owns vs. what product teams build. - Lead and empower managers and tech leads; support existing leadership, hire ahead of growth, and build strong leadership across teams. - Set engineering standards for how agents behave—treating prompts, tools, and policies as production code—and own the evaluation and guardrail approach to keep these non-deterministic systems reliable and cost-aware. - Partner closely with product and data science partners in the group, and with teams across Gusto that build on the platform. - Represent AI engineering to senior leadership and keep the group connected to Gust
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