Manager of Developer Productivity (AI Tools)

Gusto; San Francisco (CA); Sur place; USD 180 000 - 240 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Gender-affirming care

Family care & fertility benefits

Mental health resources

Free meals at office

Résumé du poste

Gustois seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to own the AI Dev Tools platform end-to-end, from the product bet to CI/security infrastructure. You will decide autonomy levels, set vendor contracts, and lead a team of senior engineers through fast-moving AI challenges.

You will collaborate with Infra, Security, and Legal, partner with the CTO, and drive spend guardrails while growing the team and shaping the future of AI-native software at Gusto.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience.
• Experience managing senior engineers through ambiguity.
• Experience owning infrastructure contracts end-to-end.
• Strong written and verbal communication with executives.
• Comfort making autonomy and risk tradeoff decisions in AI systems.
• Experience collaborating with Infra, Security and Legal.

Responsabilités

• Own the agentic coding platform end-to-end from product bet to infrastructure.
• Set direction for interactive and autonomous agent modes and integration points.
• Own the security posture, sandboxing, and risk controls for AI workloads.
• Lead vendor contracts and AI spend guardrails for the team.
• Recruit, mentor, and calibrate senior engineers; remove roadblocks.
• Partner with engineering leadership (CTO) on AI-native software direction.

Connaissances

People leadership

Vendor contracts

Cross-functional collaboration

Strategic thinking

Executive communication

Autonomy & risk decisions

Security posture

Recruiting & mentoring

Formation

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Outils

Claude Code

Cursor

Codex

AI tooling experience

Description du poste

• AI Dev Tools builds the platform Gusto engineers use to work with AI, not just alongside it: agentic coding environments (local and cloud), automated AI code review, and the CI/security infrastructure underneath both. In this role, you’ll own that platform end-to-end from the product bet (what should an agent be trusted to do autonomously, and when) to the infrastructure underneath it (CI systems, sandboxing, vendor contracts) to the team building it
• This is not a traditional “developer productivity” management role. You’ll be making judgment calls on agent autonomy and security posture, negotiating infrastructure vendor contracts, and setting the AI-spend guardrails your own team operates under in addition to the standard Engineering Manager work of growing and unblocking a team of senior engineers
• AI Dev Tools builds Gusto’s agentic coding platform: tooling infrastructure, agent runtimes, AI code reviews, The team also owns the security work required to run AI workloads safely in the cloud, like queue isolation, permission scoping.
• The team partners constantly with Infra, Security, and Legal (on vendor contracts and AI risk posture), and reports on strategy directly to Gusto’s CTO
• 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

Benefits

• Gender-affirming care and support
• Family care and support, including family planning and fertility benefits
• A variety of mental health resources
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
• Free meals and refreshments at the office (conversation and community is an added bonus!)
• Paid vacation, sick time, bereavement, and holidays, paid leaves, sabbatical, and more

• Experience owning a significant vendor or infrastructure contract from technical requirements through legal and procurement close
• Direct, hands-on experience with agentic coding tools — you are a daily power user of Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent, not someone who has read about them
• Self-driven mindset, comfortable in Gusto’s PE model: your job is removing roadblocks and setting direction, not command-and-control management
• Strong, direct communication — evidenced by briefing senior/executive stakeholders on strategy (not just status) and getting real decisions out of those conversations
• Track record of leading through ambiguity across more than one nominally separate problem domain at once
• 8+ years of engineering people leadership experience, including managing senior engineers through ambiguous, rapidly-changing technical problems (not just well-scoped roadmap execution)
• Comfort making autonomy/risk tradeoff calls on AI systems without a dedicated security team making the call for you — you understand the shape of the risk (e.g., prompt injection, credential exposure, permission bypass) well enough to scope it yourself