Head of AI Dev Tools & Platform Security

Gusto, Inc.; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 305,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto, Inc. is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager for AI Dev Tools to own the agentic coding platform end-to-end, including product bets, infrastructure, and security posture.

You will negotiate vendor contracts and set guardrails for AI spend while growing a team of senior engineers and collaborating with CTO-level leadership. You will shape the direction of interactive/ autonomous agent capabilities, manage tradeoffs between accuracy, speed, and cost, and drive risk-aware engineering

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience, including managing senior engineers through ambiguous, rapidly-changing technical problems.
• Direct, hands-on experience with agentic coding tools – you are a daily power user of Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent.
• Experience owning a significant vendor or infrastructure contract from technical requirements through legal and procurement close

Responsibilities

• 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 tradeoffs between review quality, PR merge speed, and inference cost.
• Set the security and risk posture for autonomous coding agents at Gusto. Decide what an agent can do unsupervised, own sandboxing/permission-scoping model, and drive hardening (runtime isolation, secrets handling).
• Set and enforce AI infra spend guardrails for your team, translating usage data into judgments about cost vs. value.
• Lead and grow a team of senior engineers across ambiguous problems; recruit, mentor, run hiring loop, and calibrate levels.
• Be a direct strategic partner to engineering leadership on where AI-native software development is heading at Gusto.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Vendor infra contracts

AI tooling familiarity

Security posture

People management

Strategic collaboration with CTO

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Gusto, Inc. is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager for AI Dev Tools to own the agentic coding platform end-to-end, including product bets, infrastructure, and security posture.

You will negotiate vendor contracts and set guardrails for AI spend while growing a team of senior engineers and collaborating with CTO-level leadership. You will shape the direction of interactive/ autonomous agent capabilities, manage tradeoffs between accuracy, speed, and cost, and drive risk-aware engineering