Senior People Partner (Cx)

About the Role:

This role is ideal for a People Partner who thrives in dynamic environments and is energized by the opportunity to shape strategy and translate it into meaningful, hands-on impact. As Gusto continues to evolve toward an AI-native operating model, we're looking for a Senior People Partner who can design people systems that scale intelligently-combining empathy, data, and automation to strengthen the employee experience.

You'll support one of our largest and most complex organizations, Customer Experience (CX), a high-volume, distributed, and non-exempt population where operational excellence meets innovation. In this highly visible role, you'll serve as a strategic advisor, guiding senior leaders through org design, change management, and workforce transformation. You'll use people data and AI-enabled insights to anticipate needs, identify patterns, and co-create scalable solutions that elevate both performance and trust.

As a strategic partner, you'll collaborate across People functions to design integrated, forward-looking solutions that align with business goals. You'll lead initiatives that elevate performance, scale leadership, and enhance the CX employee experience, ensuring Gusto's transformation toward an AI-native future remains grounded in humanity, equity, and purpose.

This is a unique opportunity to help shape the next generation of People practices within one of Gusto's most critical organizations-driving growth, strengthening engagement, and scaling leadership at the intersection of technology and human connection.

About the Team:

Gusto's People Team is growing and scaling with the company through integrated, intelligent systems that keep humans in the driver's seat of our AI-accelerated future. We're focused on creating equitable outcomes at scale-pairing insight and innovation to ensure technology amplifies fairness, belonging, and impact.

Together, we partner across the business to make data-driven, people-centered decisions that align strategy with the needs of every Gustie, driving a workplace that is positive, engaging, and values-driven.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day:

• Act as a strategic advisor and thought partner to business leaders, helping them navigate performance, scaling, and leadership effectiveness in an AI-native, data-rich environment.
• Lead org design and workforce planning using both human insight and AI-driven analytics to forecast capability needs, identify talent gaps, and build future-ready teams.
• Guide teams through change management and digital transformation efforts - ensuring clarity, inclusion, and engagement as automation reshapes workflows.
• Champion an inclusive and equitable employee experience, embedding fairness and transparency into tech-enabled systems and processes.
• Partner across Invite, Talent Development, Compensation, Benefits, ER, and Legal to design integrated, AI-informed people strategies aligned to business goals.
• Translate data and insights into actionable recommendations, using people analytics and predictive tools to measure impact and iterate on programs.
• Navigate complex people situations with judgment, empathy, and ethical integrity - balancing speed and compliance with trust and care.

Here's what we're looking for:

• 6+ years of progressive HR/People Partner experience, including 3-5 years in strategic HRBP roles supporting Directors, VPS, and above; experience supporting high-volume, operational, or customer-facing teams is strongly preferred
• Strategic business partner mindset with the ability to align People strategies to business goals and translate complexity into clear, data-informed action.
• Strong org design and change leadership experience, including helping teams navigate growth, restructuring, or role evolution in dynamic or tech-enabled environments.
• Fluency in AI-native ways of working - comfortable leveraging analytics, automation, and insight platforms to guide decision-making and monitor outcomes.
• Understanding of non-exempt labor laws, compliance requirements, and employee relations within distributed and hourly-heavy populations.
• Proven ability to coach and influence senior leaders through human+ system transformation - blending empathy with operational rigor.
• Collaborative systems thinker with experience partnering cross-functionally to implement cohesive, scalable people solutions.
• Deep commitment to equity and inclusion, ensuring technology enhances - not replaces - fairness, representation, and belonging.
• Resilient, ethical, and calm under pressure, with a bias toward problem-solving, learning, and continuous improvement.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is $154,045 to $189,989/year in Denver, and $181,275 to $223,573 for San Francisco & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.