APEX Risk Operations Analyst

About Gusto 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. 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 Total Rewards philosophy . 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. About the Role: As an APEX (Agent & Partner Experiences) Risk Operations Analyst, you will serve as a fraud-fighting detective for Gusto's partner ecosystem, playing a key role in keeping Gusto Embedded Payroll (GEP) and our API-driven partnerships the safest and most secure way to run payroll. In this role, you will identify patterns, recognize uncharacteristic behavior across partner-originated activity, and apply critical thinking to protect our partners and their end customers. Beyond investigation, you will continuously look for opportunities to iterate and optimize our processes — driving greater efficiency and reducing partner and customer pain along the way. This role also sits at the front line of Gusto's increasingly AI-native Risk Operations work. You'll serve as the human in the loop for AI-powered workflows — reviewing flagged cases, validating AI outputs, making nuanced decisions where human discretion matters (including complex, white-glove partner cases the AI can't yet confidently resolve), and helping improve the systems we use every day. About the Team: The APEX Risk Operations team sits within the broader Risk Operations organization and is a key stakeholder in company decisions and operations. While our Risk Fraud Operations counterparts protect Gusto's direct customers, APEX safeguards Gusto's partner ecosystem — the businesses and developers who use Gusto behind the scenes through APIs and embedded payroll to power payroll for their own end customers. Gusto Embedded Payroll (GEP) empowers developers to embed payroll solutions directly into their applications, combining robust APIs, embeddable UI flows, and developer toolkits to deliver a next-generation payroll product. Operating like a startup within Gusto, GEP moves fast and experiments often, and our team is pioneering how AI-native risk operations can secure payroll at scale for partners — giving you the chance to define industry best practices in real time. As Gusto continues moving toward an AI-first operating model, APEX is evolving how we work so more case volume is supported by AI before it reaches human review, with analysts focused on judgment, edge cases, and continuous improvement. We are a small, close group that works hard. No egos here — we collaborate, share knowledge freely, and help each other out in a positive environment. Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day: Human + AI Partnership & Feedback: Supervise and validate AI outputs for fraud and ACH risk cases originating from partner and API activity, making nuanced decisions where human discretion is needed, while documenting anomalies and opportunities for model improvement to continuously fine-tune AI system performance. AI-first mindset: Use AI tools in everyday work (Claude, Gemini, etc.). Explore how prompts, automations, or workflow tweaks can make your day-to-day work faster or smarter — and how AI can eliminate blockers not just for you, but for the whole team. Run operations: Own and optimize our operational task queues — keep things flowing, unbloc