Principal Data Scientist, Payments

<div class="content-intro"><p style="line-height: 1.2;">&nbsp;</p> <hr> <p><strong>About Gusto</strong></p> <p>At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff — payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR — so owners can focus on their craft and their customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we support more than 500,000 small businesses nationwide and are building a workplace that reflects the people we serve.</p> <p>&nbsp;<br>All full-time employees receive competitive base pay, benefits, and equity (RSUs) — because everyone who helps build Gusto should share in its success. Offer amounts are determined by role, level, and location. Learn more about our<a href="https://gusto.com/about/careers/total-rewards" target="_blank"> <u>Total Rewards philosophy</u></a>.</p> <p>&nbsp;<br>AI is a fundamental part of how work gets done at Gusto. We expect all team members to actively engage with AI tools relevant to their role and grow their fluency as the technology evolves. AI experience requirements vary by role and will be assessed during the interview process.</p></div><p>Small business owners trust Gusto with something fundamental: making sure their people get paid, on time, every time. As a Principal Data Scientist on the Payments team, you'll sit at the intersection of financial infrastructure and data science — translating the complexity of a high-scale payments ecosystem into the insights and models that shape how we build, operate, and improve our payments products.&nbsp;</p> <p>In this role you will work closely with our Product, Engineering, Design, Finance, and other Data teams to become an expert in the data for your domain, define and track metrics that help us understand our business performance, and dive deep into our payments data to deliver insights and answer questions. You’ll also integrate AI-assisted practices to accelerate analysis, enhance rigor, and expand the reach of insights across Gusto.&nbsp;</p> <p>This is a role for someone who's equally comfortable diving into ledger-level transaction data and standing in front of a payments engineering team to influence architecture decisions. If you want your work to directly protect and improve the financial lives of hundreds of thousands of small businesses, this is the role.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>Own payments intelligence end-to-end:</strong> Design and maintain measurement frameworks for payment success rates, failure root causes, retry strategies, and settlement timing — becoming the authoritative source of truth for payments health across the org.</li> <li><strong>Partner with payments engineering:</strong> Embed with backend engineering teams to understand infrastructure constraints and data availability, translate that knowledge into well-scoped experiments, and influence roadmap prioritization with data-backed recommendations.</li> <li><strong>Drive experimentation at scale:</strong> Design and analyze A/B tests and quasi-experiments across payment flows — including retry logic, routing decisions, and failure recovery — ensuring statistical rigor even in low-conversion, high-variance payment environments.</li> <li><strong>Build predictive models:</strong> Develop and deploy models for payment failure prediction, risk scoring, and anomaly detection that operate at Gusto's transaction volume, partnering with Machine Learning Engineers and Product Engineers on productionization and monitoring.</li> <li><strong>Build AI-native data products: </strong>Go beyond using AI to go faster; build data products and automated workflows with AI as a core component. Know what "good" looks like for a clustering model or automated workflow, when to trust the output, when to challenge it, and how to build guardrails that let the team scale AI use responsibly in a regulated financial context.</li> <li><strong>Own the business narrative: </strong>Be the person payments product and engineering leadership calls before an exec review, not after. Comfortable defending methodology on ARR projections, CX attribution, and cost savings in a room with skeptics. Translate nuanced statistical results and model outputs into clear, actionable narratives for payments engineers, product managers, finance partners, and executive leadership.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Here’s what we're looking for:</strong></p> <ul> <li><strong>10+ years of experience</strong> in Da