Gusto is a company that provides payroll services, employee benefits, and HR related needs for small businesses. This enables them to pay employees and contractors while also ensuring compliance across ever evolving tax, labor, and immigration laws at state and federal levels.
Gusto Embedded is focused on white-labeling Gusto’s APIs to enable enterprise businesses like Chase, US Bank, and Remote to build their own payroll offerings as a way to power higher ACVs, improve stickiness, and lower customer churn.
Responsibilities
Pre-Sales Architecture
Austen served as the technical counterpart helping the Sales team identify opportunities and close deals. He helped sell the vision of embedded payroll by designing demos and implementing solutions that showed how an Embedded product addressed partner needs.
Technical Scoping
Austen was responsible for identifying key development risks via in-depth technical scoping across RFPs / SOWs, MSAs, and Contracts. He created POCs and demos via pre-built apps and flows to build partner confidence around deliverable timing and scope creep prevention.
Post-Sales Product Development
Austen also led post-sale technical success by working closely with partner’s EPD teams to determine relevance + impact of over 100+ different embedded product features to create a bespoke payroll offering. This involved in-depth project management to ensure proper pacing.
Foundational Practices
Austen collaborated closely with EPD teams internally to provide feedback on product, API docs, bug fixing, and designing future features. He also built internal tools (AI Chatbot, SOPs, etc.) that helped build a strong foundation for the team and ensured long-term success.
Austen helped build the “Create a Demo” tool which helped partners see how easy building with Gusto could be.
Work Samples
Austen led first-of-kind work to expand GEP offering to include 3P benefit providers (ex: SimplyInsured, NEXT, and Clair).
Recommendation
“In addition to his delightful personality, Austen is exceptionally organized. I have been able to rely on Austen to consistently communicate AIs, statuses, and follow-ups after partner engagements. This also fosters a sense of trust and collaboration with partners. Working with Austen has been an absolute joy, and I wholeheartedly recommend him to join any team. His positivity, organizational prowess, dedication to partnership excellence, and teamwork make him an invaluable addition.”
- Lydnsey Mahloy-Park | Formerly Strategic Partnerships @ Gusto