Manager of Developer Productivity, Gusto
AI Tools
$240-305k
Salary varies depending on location. Offers RSUs
2-3 days a week in office
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
Be an early applicant
Automated payroll, benefits & HR platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$240-305k
Salary varies depending on location. Offers RSUs
2-3 days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To grow the small business economy.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience, including managing senior engineers through ambiguous, rapidly-changing technical problems (not just well-scoped roadmap execution)
- Direct, hands-on experience with agentic coding tools — you are a daily power user of Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent, not someone who has read about them
- Experience owning a significant vendor or infrastructure contract from technical requirements through legal and procurement close
- Comfort making autonomy/risk tradeoff calls on AI systems without a dedicated security team making the call for you — you understand the shape of the risk (e.g., prompt injection, credential exposure, permission bypass) well enough to scope it yourself
- Track record of leading through ambiguity across more than one nominally separate problem domain at once
- Strong, direct communication — evidenced by briefing senior/executive stakeholders on strategy (not just status) and getting real decisions out of those conversations
- Self-driven mindset, comfortable in Gusto's PE model: your job is removing roadblocks and setting direction, not command-and-control management
What the job involves
- AI Dev Tools builds the platform Gusto engineers use to work with AI, not just alongside it: agentic coding environments (local and cloud), automated AI code review, and the CI/security infrastructure underneath both. In this role, you'll own that platform end-to-end from the product bet (what should an agent be trusted to do autonomously, and when) to the infrastructure underneath it (CI systems, sandboxing, vendor contracts) to the team building it
- This is not a traditional "developer productivity" management role. You'll be making judgment calls on agent autonomy and security posture, negotiating infrastructure vendor contracts, and setting the AI-spend guardrails your own team operates under in addition to the standard Engineering Manager work of growing and unblocking a team of senior engineers
- AI Dev Tools builds Gusto's agentic coding platform: tooling infrastructure, agent runtimes, AI code reviews, The team also owns the security work required to run AI workloads safely in the cloud, like queue isolation, permission scoping.
- The team partners constantly with Infra, Security, and Legal (on vendor contracts and AI risk posture), and reports on strategy directly to Gusto's CTO
- Own the agentic coding roadmap. Set direction for interactive and autonomous agent modes, entry points (Slack, web, CLI), and the orchestration model for multi-step/multi-repo agent work
- Agentic code review. Own its accuracy/coverage roadmap, and make the real tradeoff calls between review quality, PR merge speed, and per-review inference cost — backed by data, not vibes
- Set the security and risk posture for autonomous coding agents at Gusto. Decide what an agent can do unsupervised, own the sandboxing/permission-scoping model, and drive the underlying hardening (runtime isolation, secrets handling, blast-radius containment) needed to run agent workloads safely
- Set and enforce AI infrastructure spend guardrails for your team, translating raw usage data into judgment calls about what's legitimate cost of doing the job vs. what needs a conversation
- Lead and grow a team of senior engineers working across ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces — recruit, mentor, run the hiring loop, and make calibration/leveling calls you can defend
- Be a direct strategic partner to engineering leadership (including the CTO) on where AI-native software development is heading at Gusto, grounded in what's actually shippable, not vendor hype
Our take
For many small businesses, vital administrative tasks such as payroll, taxes, and benefits are manual tasks that take time and energy - which many SMB owners don’t have. The co-founders of Gusto all come from small business backgrounds, which is why they created a platform that would handle employee payments, benefits administration, and compliance support specifically for small businesses.
The company may have started slowly, as the founders focused on nailing each individual aspect of Gusto’s operations, but has now skyrocketed to unicorn status with more than 400,000 customers and a multi-billion dollar valuation. And in 2021, Gusto began acquiring other companies to strengthen its offering and position in a competitive market, including the likes of Ardius, Symmetry and Guideline.
Through its continued acquisitions and fundraising efforts, the company has carved out a strong position for itself in the space. It continues to expand its platform, for example by partnering with Parafin to launch a payroll line of credit for small businesses, and more recently launching Cofounder, an AI teammate tailored to the needs of small businesses.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
45% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
May 2022
$55m
SERIES E
Aug 2021
$175m
SERIES E
Total funding: $706.3m
Company benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
- Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
- Gender-affirming care and support
- A variety of mental health resources
- Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more
- Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
Company HQ
Central Waterfront, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Joshua Reeves
(CEO & Co-Founder)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford and went onto co-found Gusto in 2011.
Tomer London
(CPO & Co-Founder)Has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Was a Researcher at Intel, and then interned at Bump Technologies. Co-founded Vizmo before co-founding Gusto in 2011.
Edward Kim
(Head of Technology & Co-Founder)Studied Electrical Engineering at Stanford. Was Senior Project Engineer at Volkswagen of America Electronics Research Lab and then co-founded Picwing before co-founding Gusto in 2011.
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