Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Staff Product Designer role sits in a core workflow layer of a SaaS platform: time, attendance, and scheduling that connects directly to payroll. In SaaS terms, that combination of operational tooling and add-on expansion tends to be where product decisions have clear downstream impact, because the experience must serve multiple user types and stay coherent across surfaces like web, mobile, and kiosk.
For a long-term SaaS design career, the notable value is the end-to-end ownership across discovery, execution, and system-level contribution. Work that spans multi-surface UX, platform consistency, and accessibility is highly portable across SaaS categories, especially where products must balance configurability with simplicity. The emphasis on partnering with Product, Engineering, and Data also maps to how mature SaaS organizations increasingly run design as an input to prioritization, not only interface refinement.
This role is best suited to a senior designer who prefers shaping ambiguous problem spaces into shippable workflows and can operate as a multiplier through critique and mentorship. It will appeal to someone who enjoys designing for operational complexity and cares about craft details that matter at scale, including performance and cohesive design systems.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About Design at Gusto
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. Read more about Design at Gusto.
About the Role:
We’re looking for a product designer to join our Time Tools team, a key area of growth for Gusto. As a core design contributor in this product area, you’ll partner closely with PM, Engineering, and Data peers to shape high-priority initiatives. You’ll be responsible for designing experiences that help small business owners and their employees manage time with confidence and ease.
This role offers the opportunity to own major product initiatives end-to-end—from uncovering customer needs to shipping polished, performant, and accessible experiences. You’ll collaborate with other designers on the team, contribute to our design system, and help elevate the craft quality of our product.
About the Team:
Time and Attendance is our flagship in a suite of add-ons designed to complement Gusto Payroll. The add-on helps small business owners track time, create and share schedules, manage attendance, and seamlessly sync hours to payroll—all within the Gusto platform. The team’s scope includes:
- Time tracking: Allow employees to log hours via web, app, or kiosk, supporting flexible work arrangements like remote and flextime.
- Scheduling: Create and manage employee schedules, accommodating shifts, availability, and shift swaps.
- Time off policies and requests: Automate time off management, support complex PTO policies, and ensure compliance with labor laws.
- PTO balances: Keep track of employee time off with automatic updates that sync vacation and sick days with payroll and calendars.
- Project tracking: Manage projects with tools for tracking time spent on tasks, analyzing progress, and adjusting workloads.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Translate customer insights into intuitive, scalable workflows that simplify scheduling, attendance, and compliance.
- Design and refine multi-surface experiences (web, mobile, kiosk) that meet the needs of both managers and employees.
- Partner with PM, Engineering, and Data to define problem spaces, set priorities, and deliver customer value.
- Champion our design system and evolve it through contributions that improve platform cohesion.
- Balance long-term vision with near-term execution, navigating ambiguity and adjusting scope as customer needs evolve.
- Provide thoughtful critique and mentorship to peers, helping elevate craft quality across the team.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- Experience: 8+ years in product design.
- Product acumen: Proven ability to collaborate with PM and Engineering partners to shape priorities and translate them into clear roadmaps.
- Craft excellence: Portfolio demonstrating accessible, performant, and thoughtful end-to-end product design across web and mobile.
- Customer empathy: Skill at uncovering and synthesizing customer needs—particularly for small businesses and hourly workers—into actionable design insights.
- Collaboration and influence: Strong communication skills, with the ability to align cross-functional partners and drive clarity in complex problem spaces.
Compensation Details
At Gusto, we strive to provide rewards that empower employees to achieve their financial and personal goals. We offer competitive compensation packages with a strong emphasis on equity based compensation (ownership in Gusto). To learn more about Gusto’s compensation philosophy and benefits offerings please view our Total Rewards Approach page.
Our cash compensation range for this role is $146,000/yr to $183,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $177,000/yr to $222,000/yr in San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
