Staff Applied AI/ML Engineer - Growth

About the Role:

Gusto’s Data Science team leverages Gusto’s rich dataset to guide product direction and decision-making. We operate full-stack conducting analyses prototyping and deploying predictive models and statistical tools both for internal use and for our customers.

For this role we are looking for a technical leader (an individual contributor) to drive our customer facing upsell motions. You will improve a model-driven recommendation platform to better understand our customers build lead scoring to drive Sales outreach and predict and experiment against customer preferences in terms of communication timing and content. Overall you will be improving the long- term value that a customer gets from Gusto by ensuring that they use the products that are most relevant to their business needs and growth.

You’ll be working with a strong AI/ML team and seasoned Growth leaders in Engineering Product Design Data Science Marketing and Sales. In this role you’ll work cross functionally to build Platforms that span the entire breadth of the Growth Stack using machine learning and AI to personalize world class content for our customers and provide timely relevant product recommendations.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design and develop scalable production-grade AI and machine learning models for solving complex business problems.

• Lead and mentor teams of ML scientists and engineers fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product engineering and business stakeholders to identify AI opportunities and translate them into actionable solutions.

• Stay current with latest AI research; prototype and implement new algorithms and advancements from academia and industry.

• Oversee model validation deployment evaluation and lifecycle management ensuring robust monitoring explainability and performance.

• Guide technical strategy roadmap and architectural decisions for the ML/AI function.

• Communicate findings roadmaps and performance results clearly to executives and non-technical partners.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• 7+ years’ hands-on experience building and deploying end-to-end ML/AI systems in industry or academia.

• Deep expertise in one or more advanced ML methods (supervised unsupervised reinforcement learning deep learning NLP LLMs RAG etc.).

• Proven track record of delivering large impactful ML/AI projects into production environments.

• Proficient in modern ML frameworks (TensorFlow PyTorch HuggingFace etc.) and cloud computing platforms (AWS GCP or Azure).

• Strong programming skills in Python and familiarity with best engineering practices (CI/CD testing code review).

• Demonstrated leadership in cross-disciplinary teams and ability to mentor scientists and engineers.

• Excellent communication skills and business acumen.

• Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science Machine Learning Statistics Mathematics or a related field is a plus.

Preferred but not required

• Hands-on experience building LLM (Claude Gemini OpenAI etc) based applications and agentic AI workflows.

• Experience developing and deploying modeling solutions such as propensity scoring recommendation engines and forecasting. A background in growth-oriented product development will accelerate the impact you can generate.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $225000 - $285000  for San Francisco New York and Seattle $205000- $255000 in Los Angeles $187000 - $235000 in Denver and $200000 - $250000 CAD for Toronto Canada. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.