Head of AI Developer Tooling & Productivity

Socket.dev; Denver (CO); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 305,000; Full time

Job summary

Gusto is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for AI Dev Tools in Denver. You’ll own the agentic coding platform end-to-end, from product bets to infrastructure, and set the security posture for autonomous coding agents while negotiating vendor contracts.

You’ll lead senior engineers, partner with CTO, and shape how AI-native development scales across the company. This hybrid role requires strategic leadership and deep technical judgment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience.
• Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex).
• Experience owning vendor or infrastructure contracts from requirements to procurement.
• Ability to make autonomy/risk tradeoff calls on AI systems.

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 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 data into judgment calls about what's legitimate cost of doing the job vs. what needs a conversation.
• Lead and grow a team of senior engineers working across ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces — recruit, mentor, run the hiring loop, and make calibration/leveling calls you can defend.
• Be a direct strategic partner to engineering leadership (including the CTO) on where AI-native software development is heading at Gusto, grounded in what's actually shippable, not vendor hype.

Skills

Leadership

Agentic tools

Vendor contracts

AI risk judgement

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

Job description

Gusto is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for AI Dev Tools in Denver. You’ll own the agentic coding platform end-to-end, from product bets to infrastructure, and set the security posture for autonomous coding agents while negotiating vendor contracts.

You’ll lead senior engineers, partner with CTO, and shape how AI-native development scales across the company. This hybrid role requires strategic leadership and deep technical judgment.