Senior Manager, Agentic Strategy & Operations

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 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). AI is a fundamental part of work  expect team members to engage with AI tools relevant to their role, and AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.

We are building AI‑powered, agentic workflows to transform how service operations scale, resolve customer needs, and maintain quality in high‑stakes environments. As an AI Solutions Architect, you will own the end‑to‑end design and performance of these workflows in production—designing, prototyping, deploying, and continuously improving AI‑driven systems that impact customer experience and operational efficiency. You will also shape the evolution of our AI platform by identifying capability gaps and informing the primitives needed to scale agentic systems.

The Service Transformation (CXT) team quickly evolves and scales how Gusto delivers service experiences and leverages AI. We design governance frameworks and feedback loops that allow the service model to improve continuously, operate reliably, and earn customer trust.

• Architect, prototype, and own end‑to‑end agentic service workflow frameworks, from scoping through production deployment and iteration—including solve and assist targets, HITL protocols, override logic, and downstream quality safeguards.
• Analyze SOPs, operational metrics, and interaction data to identify and prioritize high‑impact automation opportunities based on volume, risk, and customer impact.
• Design and implement multi‑agent orchestration patterns across tools, data sources, and decision steps within a single end‑to‑end workflow.
• Apply and influence AI platform capabilities in partnership with CoreX (Gusto's AI Platform team)—including orchestration, retrieval, and evaluation—to define what needs to be built to support production workflows at scale.
• Identify platform gaps, prototype workflow‑level solutions, and partner with engineering to shape the primitives required for reliable, scalable AI systems.
• Serve as the primary CX voice in Legal, Security, Compliance, and CoreX forums—translating CX quality stakes and workflow risk into actionable terms.
• Strengthen evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to ensure quality, compliance, and continuous improvement; contribute to Gusto's human evaluation programs and AI governance practices.
• Partner with Data teams to define and track workflow performance—solve and assist rate, AHT, rework rate, customer effort score—distinguishing between model‑level, workflow‑level, and operational drivers.
• Build ROI models to quantify workflow impact across efficiency, quality, and cost before and after deployment.
• Represent workflow performance and risk to senior stakeholders with precision and brevity.
• Lead through ambiguity and rapid change; help define a still‑being‑defined function.

• 8+ years in operations, product, or AI roles—at least 2 years designing and deploying AI‑assisted or agentic workflows.
• Strong fluency with LLM systems, including prompt design, evaluation, and production behavior at scale.
• Hands‑on experience with agentic tooling, orchestration frameworks, or MCP‑style integrations; conceptual familiarity is not sufficient.
• Experience designing human‑in‑the‑loop (HITL) systems with clear escalation logic, override controls, and compliance‑aware checkpoints.
• Working knowledge of multi‑agent systems and tool coordination.
• Strong operational judgment to define and diagnose workflow metrics.
• Proven track record influencing cross‑functional stakeholders—including Product, Engineering, Legal, Security, and Compliance—through writing, design reviews, and high‑stakes forums.
• Familiarity with Responsible AI practices, governance, and…