Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Fraud operations is increasingly central to modern SaaS platforms, especially in payroll and HR where trust, identity, and transaction integrity are part of the core product experience. This role stands out because it sits at the intersection of operational decisioning and AI-assisted workflows, reflecting how SaaS companies are redesigning risk functions as products become more automated and data-driven.
For a SaaS career, the long-term value is in learning how platform integrity is maintained at scale while reducing friction for legitimate customers. The work naturally builds fluency in investigation methods, queue and workflow design, and cross-functional incident handling, all of which translate across subscription businesses that manage payments, onboarding, or account access. The “human in the loop” component also provides practical exposure to improving AI outputs through feedback and documentation, a capability becoming more common across SaaS operations roles.
This role is best suited to professionals who enjoy structured problem solving, pattern recognition, and making judgment calls with incomplete information. It will fit someone who prefers operational ownership and continuous process iteration, and who is motivated by protecting customers while collaborating with internal stakeholders on escalations and system improvements.
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 the Role:
As a Fraud Operations Analyst, you will serve as a fraud-fighting detective, playing a key role in making Gusto the safest and most secure payroll and benefits solution. In this role, you will identify patterns, recognize uncharacteristic behavior, and apply critical thinking to protect our customers. Beyond investigation, you will continuously look for opportunities to iterate and optimize our processes — driving greater efficiency and reducing customer pain along the way.
This role also sits at the front line of Gusto’s increasingly AI-native Risk Operations work. You’ll serve as the human in the loop for AI-powered workflows—reviewing flagged cases, validating AI outputs, making nuanced decisions where human discretion matters, and helping improve the systems we use every day.
About the Team:
The Risk Operations organization is at the core of our business, and our team is a key stakeholder in company decisions and operations. The Fraud Operations team safeguards our customers, company, and platform integrity.
Today, Gusto helps power payroll, benefits, and HR for 500,000+ small and medium-sized businesses. As Gusto continues moving toward an AI-first operating model, Risk Operations is evolving how we work so more case volume is supported by AI before it reaches human review, with analysts focused on judgment, edge cases, and continuous improvement.
We are a small, close group that works hard. No egos here—we collaborate, share knowledge freely, and help each other out in a positive environment.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
- Human + AI Partnership & Feedback: Supervise and validate AI outputs for fraud cases, making nuanced decisions where human discretion is needed, while documenting anomalies and opportunities for model improvement to continuously fine-tune AI system performance
- AI-first mindset: Use AI tools in everyday work (Claude, Gemini, etc.). Explore how prompts, automations, or workflow tweaks can make your day-to-day work faster or smarter.
- Run operations: Own and optimize our operational task queues—keep things flowing, unblock teams, and put the pieces together to make sense.
- Protect platform integrity: Safeguard Gusto's ecosystem by investigating flagged activity, validating high-impact findings, and taking decisive action to mitigate risk while minimizing friction for legitimate customers.
- Proactive critical thinking: Fraud is a complicated puzzle to solve. Come up with innovative methods to identify trends, patterns, and ideally catch unusual activity before impact.
- Builder Mindset in Action: Identify small manual pain points and experiment with ways to automate or simplify them using AI tools to improve team performance.
- Work closely with key stakeholders: Work cross-functionally with internal teams, our customers, and external partners.
- Deliver world-class customer service: Be a resource to our internal teams and customers while working as a Subject Matter Expert to help with escalations pertaining to our area of expertise.
Here’s what we're looking for:
- Experience: 2+ years of experience in operational work, detection and/or investigation.
- Thought Process: An insatiable appetite for problem solving, knack for structured thinking using a data driven approach, ability to spot unusual patterns, and sharp attention to detail. Demonstrates curiosity and a bias toward experimentation—asks “why” and tests “what if.”
- Values: Driven by a strong moral compass, is objective yet compassionate, and does the right thing every time.
- Discipline: Excellent time management skills and ability to handle multiple projects/tasks simultaneously. Is extremely process and policy oriented.
- Attitude: Goal-oriented, positive, and proactive. Comfortable in a fast-paced, results-oriented work environment. Communicates well with others.
- Bonus points for:
- Familiarity with fraud typologies, transaction patterns, and risk indicators.
- Professional certifications (CFE)
- Payroll industry experience
- SQL/data analysis knowledge
Our cash compensation amount for this role is between $68,085 - $83,972/year in Denver and between $$85,105 - $104,963/year for New York/San Francisco. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
