Senior Creative Program Manager

About Gusto

At Gusto, we're on a mission to grow the small business economy. We handle the hard stuff—like payroll, health insurance, 401(k)s, and HR—so owners can focus on their craft and customers. With teams in Denver, San Francisco, and New York, we're proud to support more than 400,000 small businesses across the country, and we're building a workplace that represents and celebrates the customers we serve. Learn more about our Total Rewards philosophy.

About Design at Gusto

Design at Gusto is made up of over 80 creative, collaborative people who care deeply about our mission to empower small businesses and their employees. We're a cross-functional group that is always looking for opportunities to build understanding and empathy for the people who use Gusto. We don't care much about swim lanes and though we care deeply about quality and craft, we are never precious about it. We work closely with cross-functional partners in Product, Engineering, Data, and Marketing to design, build, and ship experiences that make a real difference. We believe great design can make hard things possible, even delightful.

We are building an AI-native creative organization — and we mean that seriously. We're looking for people who are already working this way: using AI to keep a growing team's systems, schedules, and stakeholders aligned, not just to move faster. This isn't a future aspiration — it's how we work now, and it's changing what creative operations looks like at Gusto and across the industry.

About the Opportunity

Gusto's Brand Studio is at an exciting inflection point. We’re scaling the team and building the systems to meet our growing ambition, from the brand refresh to increasingly complex, multi-channel integrated campaigns.

We're looking for a Senior Creative Program Manager to be the connective tissue between Brand Studio and the cross-functional partners we build with: Marketing, PMM, R&D, and Legal. This role reports to the Manager of Creative Operations, who sets the operational roadmap and defines how the creative team interfaces with Marketing. You'll independently execute against that roadmap: unblocking projects, managing cross-functional stakeholders, and driving timelines across standard tier-1/tier-2 launches and complex, multi-channel integrated campaigns, each with its own approval checkpoint and parallel workstream.

A core part of the role is helping stand up, optimize, and maintain the team's project infrastructure including the Brand Studio dashboard (an all-up project view for resourcing and capacity planning) and its task tracker, and driving consistent adoption and project management hygiene across the team and stakeholders. The Manager of Creative Operations leads the systems-level architecture; you'll help build it out and own ongoing optimization and maintenance.

If you bring calm and clarity to fast-changing, multi-stakeholder work and you want to help shape, scale, and optimize the processes that let a growing in-house creative team meet this moment, this is your role.

Here's what you'll do day-to-day

• Serve as the primary point of contact for cross-functional stakeholders (Marketing, PMM, Legal, R&D) across active projects including running daily/weekly updates, unblocking work, and escalating when needed
• Build and maintain creative workback schedules, keeping the project source of truth (in partnership with Marketing) current as scope, deliverables, and deadlines shift
• Manage vendor and agency relationships end to end including contractor paperwork, PO management, onboarding/access, and day-to-day production coordination with partners like STATE, Superside, and Uprise Art
• Own the legal & compliance review pipeline for your projects including submitting requests, chasing disclosures and input, and keeping creative moving through legal feedback
• Flag risks and dependencies early across creative projects, escalating to leadership before they become delivery problems
• Schedule and run feedback checkpoints from internal crits and stakeholder reviews to leadership sign-offs, and consolidate feedback back to the team
• Coordinate production logistics for shoots, agency staffing, on-site support, and the stakeholder management that comes with it
• Help stand up, optimize, and maintain the team's AI-enabled project infrastructure, including the Brand Studio dashboard and task tracker, and keep project management hygiene consistent across the team
• Run retros and drive process improvements for better templates, tighter rituals, small workflow automations

Here's what we're looking for

• 5–7 years of experience in creative, marketing, or brand production/project management — in-house or a blend of in-house and agency-side — with hands-on experience running point on multiple active projects, stakeholders, and vendors at once
• Experience managing complex, multi-channel integrated campaigns with multiple channel owners, including multiple approval checkpoints and parallel workstreams within a single project, and balancing a portfolio of several such projects simultaneously
• Experience building and maintaining workback schedules and/or project hubs (expertise doing this in Notion a plus) that a team relies on, and helping stand up, optimize, or drive adoption of project management infrastructure such as dashboards, task trackers, or similar systems across a team
• Familiarity optimizing and maintaining AI-enabled tools and designing systems from scratch when needed; hands-on, daily use of AI tools for drafting, synthesis, and status updates
• Comfort operating in ambiguity and shifting scope and experience in an agile, fast-changing environment (integrated campaigns, product marketing, or paid media).
• Strong written and verbal communication; interest in running retros and improving process (templates, rituals, small workflow automations)
• You bring order and calm to complexity. For example, a project without a clear owner, timeline, or next step doesn't sit well with you.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is targeted at $146,000-$174,000 /yr in Denver & most remote locations, and $177,000-$211,000 /yr for San Francisco, Seattle & New York. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate experience and expertise, and may vary from the amounts listed above.