About this role
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 at Gusto. We 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.
About the Role:
AI Dev Tools builds the platform Gusto engineers use to work with AI, not just alongside it: agentic coding environments (local and cloud), automated AI code review, and the CI/security infrastructure underneath both. In this role, you'll own that platform end-to-end from the product bet (what should an agent be trusted to do autonomously, and when) to the infrastructure underneath it (CI systems, sandboxing, vendor contracts) to the team building it.
This is not a traditional "developer productivity" management role. You'll be making judgment calls on agent autonomy and security posture, negotiating infrastructure vendor contracts, and setting the AI-spend guardrails your own team operates under in addition to the standard Engineering Manager work of growing and unblocking a team of senior engineers.
About the Team:
AI Dev Tools builds Gusto's agentic coding platform: tooling infrastructure, agent runtimes, AI code reviews, The team also owns the security work required to run AI workloads safely in the cloud, like queue isolation, permission scoping.
The team partners constantly with Infra, Security, and Legal (on vendor contracts and AI risk posture), and reports on strategy directly to Gusto's CTO.
Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:
• Own the agentic coding roadmap. Set direction for interactive and autonomous agent modes, entry points (Slack, web, CLI), and the orchestration model for multi-step/multi-repo agent work.
• Agentic code review. Own its accuracy/coverage roadmap, and make the real tradeoff calls between review quality, PR merge speed, and per-review inference cost — backed by data, not vibes.
• Set the security and risk posture for autonomous coding agents at Gusto. Decide what an agent can do unsupervised, own the sandboxing/permission-scoping model, and drive the underlying hardening (runtime isolation, secrets handling, blast-radius containment) needed to run agent workloads safely.
• Set and enforce AI infrastructure spend guardrails for your team, translating raw usage dat