Growth Marketing Lead

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff – payroll, health insurance, 401(k) s, and HR – so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.

All full‑time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) – because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done  expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

Small businesses run on relationships, and word of mouth is one of the most powerful and underutilized growth levers in the SMB market. The small business owners who use Gusto are among our most vocal advocates, and this role exists to turn that goodwill into a scalable acquisition engine. As our Growth Marketing Lead / Head of Customer Referral & Emerging Channels, you'll own the programs that harness how customers naturally talk about us, accelerating our referral program, activating customer reviews, and tapping chat and other emerging communication channels.

You'll use AI to surface high‑intent advocates, personalize outreach at scale, and identify the signals that predict who’s most likely to refer. Partnering closely with our AEO team, you’ll coordinate emerging acquisition plays across the funnel.

The Demand Generation team at Gusto is responsible for driving qualified pipeline and customer growth across all channels. We are a detail‑oriented, experiment‑driven team that works closely with Sales, Product, and Rev Ops to build scalable programs that move the business. We believe great growth marketing is part art, part science, and we're always testing, learning, and iterating. You'll lead a team of sharp marketers who genuinely care about the small businesses we serve.

• Manage and develop the growth marketing team, setting clear goals, providing coaching, and fostering a culture of accountability and innovation.
• Own and evolve Gusto's customer referral program from strategy and incentive design to measurement and optimization, driving meaningful new customer acquisition and revenue through word‑of‑mouth and network effects.
• Build and run a rigorous experimentation roadmap, using advanced testing and data analysis to identify growth levers and scale what works.
• Scout, pilot, and scale emerging acquisition channels, bringing rigor to what gets tested and moving quickly from hypothesis to results.
• Partner with the Web Marketing team to surface and prioritize conversion experiments, translating referral and emerging channel performance data into landing page hypotheses and post‑click optimizations that improve acquisition outcomes.
• Partner cross‑functionally with Growth, Product, Sales, Rev Ops, and Data teams to align growth programs with business priorities and optimize the full funnel from awareness to activation.
• Use AI tools as a consistent, habitual part of your workflow, generating referral program briefs, developing incentive copy variants, accelerating channel research, and building reusable systems that scale best practices across the team.
• Report on program performance to senior leadership, distilling complex data into clear insights and concrete recommendations.

• 10+ years of experience in growth marketing, demand generation, or performance marketing, with at least 3 years in a people‑management role.
• Demonstrated success building and scaling customer acquisition programs (referral, affiliate, and/or word‑of‑mouth) from concept to measurable growth.
• Working knowledge of paid acquisition channels (SEM, paid social, ABM, etc.) and a strong grasp of full‑funnel growth strategy.
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to translate data…