Job description
About Gusto
At Gusto, we’re on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.
About the Role:
As a Senior People Partner Lead, you will be the senior People strategist aligned to the Go-To-Market (GTM) organization (Sales, Marketing, Revenue Operations). You will act as a deep strategic partner, manager, and coach to the senior executive leaders within GTM, influencing decisions that have Gusto-wide impact.
Your mandate is to design and build the organizational, talent, and culture strategy that prepares the GTM business for an AI-Native future, positioning the function for long-term success. This role is focused on forward-looking strategy, diagnosis, design, and executive coaching.
As the City Architect for GTM’s People strategy, you will lead the People Strategy and Plans across complex, cross-functional GTM teams and may empower People Partner pods across multiple functions.
About the Team:
Gusto’s People Team is scaling alongside the company and is dedicated to designing and delivering a world-class employee experience. We are focused on operational excellence, innovation, and strategic partnership. As part of this team, you will contribute to evolving our People Partner function into an executive-level strategic powerhouse, partnering across all centers of excellence (COEs) to deliver integrated, impactful people solutions.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
Strategic & AI-Native Organizational Design
- Future of Work Design: Partner with the Head of GTM to define roles of the future, specifically designing the optimal division of labor, required skillsets, and organizational structures for humans working alongside AI agents to achieve maximum GTM outcomes.
- Talent Strategy & Workforce Planning: Partner with the executive leader to evolve and execute the AI-Native talent strategy, predicting future capability needs and developing strategies for organizational structure, leveling, and workforce movement.
- Organizational Diagnosis: Serve as a proactive organizational diagnostician. Consistently use and coach others to use AI to synthesize complex, unstructured data (e.g., gPulse comments, exit interviews, performance narratives) into data-backed hypotheses for organizational risk (e.g., change fatigue, skill gaps, attrition models).
- Structural Intervention: Design, plan, and lead high-stakes, complex organizational changes and scaling efforts across multiple GTM functions, ensuring seamless alignment with business strategy and compliance. This includes being able to develop strategy and lead execution.
Executive Coaching and Influence
- Strategic Coaching & Influence: Act as a coach and advisor to the GTM leadership team, guiding them on culture evolution, high performing teams, leadership effectiveness, organizational health, and navigating ambiguity. Influences business-wide decisions with significant people implications.
- Change Leadership: Partner with leaders on the strategy and execution of high-stakes change plans for GTM, ensuring clarity, consistency, and minimizing change fatigue across the organization.
People Leadership and Execution Governance
- People Leadership & Craft: Act as a thought leader across the broader People Team, playing a critical role, alongside peers, to evolve the People Partner craft and providing strategic guidance. Collaborate closely with peers across other functions to define and advance the People Partner craft
- Program Governance: Serve as the final escalation point for process and program issues within GTM; partner with COE Leads (Compensation, Legal, ER) to navigate high-risk employee relations cases and complex compliance issues.
- High-Fidelity Strategy Generation: Oversee the creation of sensitive strategies and associated documentation (e.g., restructuring memos, executive proposals), ensuring high accuracy and policy adherence, leveraging AI tools as the first drafter for efficiency.
Here’s what we’re looking for:
Experience: 8+ years of progressive HR/People Partner experience, with 3+ years supporting C-Suite/SVP/VP-level client groups in a high-growth, complex technology environment. Direct GTM (Sales, Marketing, RevOps) experience required.
- Note: While this role is not a direct people manager at this time, the ability to mentor and lead through influence is critical.
Business Acumen: Deep understanding of the GTM function and the ability to align people strategy to measurable business outcomes (e.g., pipeline health, quota attainment, revenue growth).
AI Fluency: Demonstrated ability to understand and leverage AI/ML outputs (e.g., attrition models, sentiment analysis) to inform and design strategic talent decisions.
Coaching & Influence: Proven track record of building trust and influencing executive leadership through candor, empathy, and data-backed business insight.
Systems Thinking: Ability to see beyond organizational boundaries and connect local talent strategy with company-wide People systems and centralized program goals, shaping the overall vision and direction.
Executive Decision Making: Demonstrated ability to make impactful and complex decisions on people strategy that shape the company’s culture and long-term success.
Our cash compensation range for this role is: Denver: $154,045 – $189,989/year SF Bay Area & New York: $181,275 – $223,573/year. Final offer amounts are based on location, experience, and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto’s subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.
Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.
When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required. This includes non-office days for hybrid employees.
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.
Gusto is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.
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