Sr. Staff AI/ML Engineer

About the Role

The Sr Staff AI ML Engineer role at Gusto centers on designing, building, and scaling the AI platform that empowers internal teams to create intelligent agents and deliver customer value. This position owns the full lifecycle from problem framing to production deployment of core platform capabilities, including agent orchestration, RAG infrastructure, eval tooling, model serving, prompt management, observability, and safety guardrails. You will shape technical standards, drive architectural decisions, and mentor engineers across the organization while ensuring the platform is reliable, performant, and easy to adopt. The role requires collaboration with product engineers, PMs, and designers to translate AI and ML research into robust production experiences that unblock teams and accelerate innovation across Gusto.

What You'll Do

You will design and build scalable platform services such as agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, eval frameworks, and model serving to enable internal teams to ship AI powered products. This includes leading technical strategy and architecture for the AI platform, covering model lifecycle, observability, safety guardrails, and evaluation infrastructure. You will collaborate cross functionally with app teams, PMs, and designers to understand their AI needs and deliver platform capabilities that remove bottlenecks and accelerate delivery. Additional responsibilities involve building hardening and operating shared infrastructure that powers intelligent agents across Gusto, including retrieval, routing, prompt management, and content selection. You will stay current with AI and ML research, rapidly prototype new techniques, and productionize them to strengthen the platform. You will also establish robust practices for validation, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing performance management of platform services and the agents built on them. Communicating technical strategy tradeoffs and impact clearly to executives and non technical partners is essential, as is mentoring engineers across teams to raise the bar on AI and ML best practices and foster a culture of pragmatic innovation.

Requirements

The role requires 12 plus years of building and deploying end to end AI and ML systems, with experience designing platform level infrastructure that other engineering teams build upon. You will need deep expertise in one or more areas such as LLMs, NLP, retrieval and RAG, agent orchestration, deep learning, or reinforcement learning. Hands on experience building LLM based applications and agentic workflows is essential, including prompt engineering, retrieval design, evaluation, and production deployment. Proficiency with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, along with Hugging Face, and cloud platforms including GCP, AWS, or Azure, is required. Strong Python skills and sound software engineering fundamentals, such as testing, code review, CI CD, reliability, and API design, are necessary. Gusto expects a proven track record of shipping impactful AI and ML projects to production, ideally in high scale, high availability environments, along with experience with data platform concepts and experiment and evaluation practices to inform product decisions. Comfort working in a fast paced, rapidly evolving environment where priorities change based on business needs is also required for this position.

About Gusto and Total Rewards

At Gusto, the mission is to grow the small business economy by handling the hard stuff such as payroll, health insurance, 401k plans, and HR, so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. The company supports more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and maintains teams in Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Gusto is building a workplace that reflects the people it serves, and all full time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity in the form of RSUs, because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. More information about the Total Rewards philosophy is available through the provided resources.

Practical Details

This role is based in Denver, CO; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; or Los Angeles, CA and is a full time engagement. Compensation details follow Gusto's Total Rewards philosophy, and further information can be found on the careers site. Only the details specified in the official description, including hours, travel, visa, or deadlines, apply.