Principal Data Scientist

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle payroll, health insurance, 401(k) s, and HR so owners can focus on their craft and customers. Our teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York support more than 400,000 small businesses nationwide and build a workplace that reflects those we serve.

All full‑time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity. AI tools are integral to our workflow, and experience with AI will be assessed during interview.

We are looking for a Principal Data Scientist on the Payments team who sits at the intersection of financial infrastructure and data science.

• Own payments intelligence end‑to‑end:
  Design and maintain measurement frameworks for payment success rates, failure root causes, retry strategies, and settlement timing, becoming the authoritative source of truth for payments health across the org.
• Partner with payments engineering:
  Embed with backend engineering teams to understand infrastructure constraints and data availability, translate that knowledge into well‑scoped experiments, and influence roadmap prioritization with data‑backed recommendations.
• Drive experimentation at scale:
  Design and analyze A/B tests and quasi‑experiments across payment flows—including retry logic, routing decisions, and failure recovery—ensuring statistical rigor even in low‑conversion, high‑variance payment environments.
• Build predictive models:
  Develop and deploy models for payment failure prediction, risk scoring, and anomaly detection that operate at Gusto's transaction volume, partnering with Machine Learning Engineers and Product Engineers on productionisation and monitoring.
• Build AI‑native data products:
  Create data products and automated workflows with AI as a core component, establishing guardrails that let the team scale AI responsibly in a regulated financial context.
• Own the business narrative:
  Translate nuanced statistical results and model outputs into clear, actionable narratives for payments engineers, product managers, finance partners, and executive leadership.

• 10+ years of experience in Data Science or a closely related quantitative role at a product‑focused software company, with meaningful exposure to payments, fintech, or financial infrastructure.
• Deep payments domain knowledge:
  Hands‑on experience with payments infrastructure—ACH, card networks, bank integrations, settlement flows, or equivalent, with a strong intuition for how backend systems shape data availability and quality.
• Strong SQL and Python skills, with experience querying large‑scale transactional datasets and building reproducible analytical pipelines.
• Proven experimentation and causal inference expertise:
  Ability to design rigorous experiments in challenging payment contexts (rare events, high variance, non‑stationarity) and communicate trade‑offs clearly.
• AI‑native mindset:
  Experience building data products and analytical workflows with AI as a core component, knowing when to trust output and how to build guardrails in a financial context.
• Cross‑functional influence:
  Track record of collaborating with and influencing backend engineers and technical stakeholders, not just product and business partners.

Targeted salary $184,000 – $210,000 per year in Denver; $217,000 – $250,000 per year in San Francisco and New York.

Denver, San Francisco, or New York. Employees expected to work from the office 2–3 days per week, unless remote eligibility is approved with a stable, reliable internet connection.

Gusto is a proud 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, disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other applicable legally protected characteristic. We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local law and provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our application procedures.

Personal information collected and processed as part of your application will be subject to Gusto's Applicant Privacy Notice.