Principal Product Manager, Payroll Platform

About the Role

As Principal Product Manager for Payroll Platform, you’ll build the foundation for the future of payroll at Gusto. You’ll shape the APIs that help teams and partners create new ways to pay people, connect payroll to the tools where work happens, and enable AI agents to turn complex tasks into simpler experiences. Your work will help businesses spend less time preparing payroll and give product builders more room to innovate, with trust built into every step.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities

• Ownership: Define the vision, strategy and roadmap for Payroll Platform. Decide what belongs in the shared platform and what teams build on top, including API contracts, common pay-input interfaces and the boundaries between payroll and neighboring systems.
• North Star: Drive adoption by the teams, partners and agents building on payroll. Define and use metrics for adoption, reliability and error rates, and connect them to customer outcomes such as fewer payroll errors and less time preparing payroll.
• Collaborate: Lead work across engineering, design, data and compliance. Partner with the teams consuming the platform, make speed-versus-safety trade-offs explicit, and help what they build feel like one product.
• Platform Engineering: Build a unified payroll API and lead migrations of existing users and systems onto it, making it easier for teams and partners to support different worker types and new ways to pay people.
• AI Agents & Safety: Define the payroll actions, controls, audit trails and evaluations that let AI agents work safely. Prototype and test with AI, and expand agent autonomy as evidence supports it.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of direct Product Management experience.
• Experience owning a platform, API or developer product that other teams or partners built on, and driving its adoption.
• Technical fluency in APIs, data models and system design, with experience leading a migration to a new API or interface and credibility with senior engineers.
• Strong platform judgment: ability to decide what the shared system should and shouldn’t do, and make thoughtful choices about contracts and other decisions that are difficult to reverse.
• Experience designing for trust in systems where errors have real consequences, including clear controls, auditability and evidence-based expansion of automation.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs or agents, including tool design and evaluations. You use AI to prototype and ship, and can explain the choices and trade-offs behind your work.
• Experience leading multi-team work across engineering, design and data, and connecting platform metrics to customer outcomes.
• Payroll, payments, tax or fintech experience is a plus, not required.