Senior People (HR) Business Partner

 

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we’re proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we’re building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy. 

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 will support groups within the Foundations group, including Finance, Accounting, Business Operations, Legal and Compliance. These distributed teams provide critical services within and across Gusto, leading initiatives focused on business strategy, operational excellence and 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 mon