Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

Complex customer journeys where coordination matters most. Cross-cutting journeys where outcomes depend on coordination across people, systems, operations, and AI — and where breakdowns are costly. The work includes understanding how these journeys operate today, shaping the intended service experience, identifying the operational capabilities needed to deliver it sustainably, improving how work routes between teams and systems, and establishing how journey health is measured over time.
AI-assisted service design workflows. Building tools and workflows that help product and operational teams think through service implications before launch: What happens if something fails? How does escalation work? Where does the customer go next? How will teams know whether the experience is performing well?
Distributed practice enablement. Helping adjacent practitioners — including product designers, product operations managers, and process improvement analysts — apply service design methods in their own domains through reusable tools, guidance, training, and support.
Cross-journey coordination and learning. Helping teams work from shared patterns and operating assumptions so customers experience Gusto as a coordinated service rather than disconnected systems. This includes identifying recurring failure patterns, shaping reusable approaches, and improving how the organization learns from service performance over time.

Here’s what we're looking for:

Credible inside a product cadence. You shape decisions from within delivery pressure, not by running parallel workshops or alignment programs. You understand how product organizations make decisions and can operate inside that rhythm.
Influence without authority. You help stakeholders see consequences and tradeoffs by creating clarity, not by pitching or evangelizing. You're comfortable when leaders decide differently than you'd recommend. You respect decision rights.
Makes the complex legible. You take a messy, multi-team service system and create representations that teams can reason about together. The artifact is a tool for shared understanding, not a deliverable to hand off.
Works with operational reality. You've spent meaningful time with frontline and operational teams and use that input to inform strategy. You understand that customer experience is an outcome of how business systems interact — product, business rules, frontline teams, back office ops, external constraints.
Designs for the service implications of AI. You think through what happens when the AI gets it wrong, how uncertainty should be represented to customers, how work routes between automated and human support, and how to preserve customer agency. You treat AI not just as a workflow tool but as a delivery component that changes how the service behaves.
Judgment under ambiguity. You move work forward when the data is incomplete, ownership is unclear, and the problem spans multiple domains.
Designs for operational sustainability. You understand that good services don’t sustain themselves. Beyond shaping the experience itself, you think about the organizational capabilities, stewardship models, and learning mechanisms needed to help teams deliver and evolve the service successfully over time.
Strong communicator. You communicate vision, concepts, and recommendations clearly to a variety of audiences including leadership, creating alignment and motivating action without jargon

Experience:

8+ years of service design experience, including meaningful work inside technology organizations alongside product, engineering, CX, and operational teams.
Experience helping teams make decisions and move work forward inside fast-moving product and operational environments.
Demonstrated ability to make complex service ecosystems understandable through maps, models, frameworks, or other working representations that stakeholders can navigate, discuss, and build on together.
Track record of influencing roadmap, operational, or investment decisions through strong judgment, clear framing, and thoughtful articulation of tradeoffs and implications.
Experience designing or operating services where AI, automation, or algorithmic systems shaped how work was delivered — including how those systems interacted with human teams and customer-facing experiences. Candidates without direct AI experience...