Head of Payments

Position Summary
Gusto moves hundreds of billions of dollars per year. The Head of Payments of Gusto will be responsible for (1) ensuring that our 300K+ businesses and millions of their employees are getting paid on time every time; (2) expanding/developing payment rails and payment methods across US and International; (3) building partnerships with payments providers to help improve our unit economics and expand our payments product suite that strengthens our payroll payments architecture while also enabling our new Employer and Employee financial services products/app teams; (4) solidify our customer ledger and reconciliation platforms for reliability; and (5) (re)architecting our payments platform to scale for the future. The Head of Payments will be a multi-disciplinary person who will empower the Engineering, Product Management and Payments Partnerships across Payments. This role will be tasked with retaining and building a deep bench of People Empowerers (Gusto Managers!) who can lead high-performing and highly engaged engineering teams. They will help the business scale through private and public phases of our company-building journey. They will work in close partnership with the Head of Accounting, Head of Revenue, Head of Engineering, Head of Members, Head of Data Science and Head of Design. 

Key Responsibilities

• Develop the long term vision of the payments team at Gusto and expand/develop payment rails and payment methods across US and International while ensuring that our 300K+ businesses and millions of their employees are getting paid on time, every time
• Enable reliable, efficient, compliant and cost effective end-to-end payments and money movement
• Empower a multi-disciplinary team across engineering, product management, and payments partnerships to drive consistent execution of the next generation of payments capabilities that enable Gusto to expand its product offerings
• Be accountable and responsible for the proper movement and accounting of money across Gusto by enhancing ledger and reconciliation platforms
• Work cross-functionally with Accounting and treasury to improve unit economics by engaging with banking and payments partners and de-risking any payments-related issues with bank partners
• Work cross-functionally with Data Science and Growth teams to make tradeoffs that build customer trust

Ideal Candidate Profile 

• 12+ years of expertise in Payments platforms at scaled FinTech companies: Experience successfully leading payments teams at scaled Fintech companies. Has managed the building of scalable and global payments platforms. In addition, this person should have collaborated with payments partners across the industry (as part of implementation of their technical work or for influencing). Experience with payment regulations including money licensing requirements/managing organizations to achieve and maintain SOC2 compliance is a plus. Knowledge of payments unit economics and how they work is also a plus.  
• Have strong General Management capabilities: Has a business builder mindset with experience managing cross-functional teams across product and engineering to drive goals for the business.
• Can build organizational scale: Has built and scaled multifunctional/multidisciplinary teams that can run autonomously and innovate on the payments stack. 
• Is execution focused: Has a track record of executing bold ideas (or old ideas that did not see fruition) by influencing all across the company and finding ways to unblock and execute them differently.
• Inspiring: This person has the ability to inspire folks to build the next generation of platform services that power financial products. They have created highly engaged, representative, and high-performing teams. They can also inspire across all Gusto People Empowerers through verbal and communication skills.
• Possess high judgment: This person has the ability to make tradeoffs based on first principles and can make difficult decisions that are right for their organization and company.

Other Personal Characteristics

• Alignment and passion for supporting SMBs through their customer experience journey
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Gives the right feedback at the right moment, and makes the hard talent decisions when necessary
• Excellent critical-thinking skills and first principles problem-solving skills
• Enables a culture of accountability and ownership
• A team player and exceptional collaborator across all teams at Gusto
• A People Empowerer who values relationships with staff and peers equally
• A hands-on approach to performing duties, as well as the ability to keep the strategic initiatives in focus

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at  $261,000-299,000/yr for San Francisco & New York. $222,000-256,000/yr in Denver & most remote locations, Stock equity is additional. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.

Last updated on Aug 20, 2024