Principal Applied AI Scientist

About Gusto

Gusto is a modern, online people platform that helps small businesses take care of their teams. On top of full-service payroll, Gusto offers health insurance, 401(k)s, expert HR, and team management tools. Today, Gusto offices in Denver, San Francisco, and New York serve more than 300,000 businesses nationwide.

Our mission is to create a world where work empowers a better life, and it starts right here at Gusto. That’s why we’re committed to building a collaborative and inclusive workplace, both physically and virtually. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

Gusto is looking for a Principal Applied AI Scientist to join our AI team and build out our Generative AI capabilities.

About the Role:

We’re looking to accelerate AI investments across the business to solve customer pain points, and are growing our Applied AI team. You’ll be a part of the core group of experts exploring big, innovative bets, quickly prototyping solutions and shipping to customers. You're also responsible for quickly iterating on improvements and eventually scaling to production-grade AI applications. You’ll be working alongside a multidisciplinary group of Product Engineers, PMs, and Design.

In this role, you’ll be responsible for designing, building, evaluating, and shipping products that use proprietary and open source LLMs. You’ll be responsible for all aspects of the AI development lifecycle: framing the problem, designing the system, making decisions on frameworks, building, evaluation, and deploying. As an Applied AI Scientist, you’ll own the customer impact end-to-end.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Design, develop and deploy innovative AI solutions
• Experiment with multi-agent frameworks to build autonomous systems
• Improve LLMs through pre-training, fine-turning, and RLHF
• Build evaluation for LLMs and LLM based products, and assess best methods required to build LLMs suited for purpose
• Collaborate with the engineering team to determine technical requirements and SLAs for API-enabled services
• Research novel AI techniques and strategies that create magical customer experiences

Here’s what we're looking for:

• At least 8+ years of software engineering experience (Python, Ruby or Java), and 8+ years designing and shipping Gen AI models
• Experience with agentic frameworks like Langgraph and Llama-Index
• Proven ability to design and prototype AI solutions quickly
• Experience working on multi-agent AI systems to automate end to end workflows
• Experience building, deploying and maintaining LLM-based applications in production

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $191,000-$237,000/year in Denver, Chicago, and Atlanta, $208,000-$258,000/year in Los Angeles and Seattle, and $225,000-$279,000/year for San Francisco and New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Gusto has physical office spaces in Denver, San Francisco, and New York City. Employees who are based in those locations will be expected to work from the office on designated days approximately 2-3 days per week (or more depending on role). The same office expectations apply to all Symmetry roles, Gusto's subsidiary, whose physical office is in Scottsdale.

Note: The San Francisco office expectations encompass both the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas.

When approved to work from a location other than a Gusto office, a secure, reliable, and consistent internet connection is required.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do we. We hire great people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes our company stronger. If you share our values and our enthusiasm for small businesses, you will find a home at Gusto.

Gusto is proud to be an 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, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Gusto considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Gusto is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. We want to see our candidates perform to the best of their ability. If you require a medical or religious accommodation at any time throughout your candidate journey, please fill out this form and a member of our team will get in touch with you.

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