Associate Principal, Financial Data

About the Role:

Platform Accounting is the financial engine behind Gusto's payment platform. We record customer cash movements and liabilities, and increasingly corporate cash activity across new and expanding product lines, on Gusto's homegrown payroll infrastructure. This work directly underpins our financial statements, audit readiness, and compliance.

The Associate Principal, Financial Data role is a high-impact position bridging Data, Product Engineering, Accounting, and Finance Operations. This individual will be the steward of financial data integrity, owning the crucial connective layer that ensures all financial data is accurate, complete, and prepared for audits, particularly as the business expands and new products are launched.

This role requires a unique combination of expertise: deep knowledge in accounting and business context, proven experience in maintaining data integrity, and a strong passion for applying innovative AI solutions to financial operations. We are looking for a naturally curious and forward-thinking candidate - someone who is already experimenting with AI tools, developing intelligent workflows, and constantly seeking the next opportunity for optimization.

Here’s what you’ll do day-to-day:

• Own the financial data layer that feeds close, reporting, and controls: ensuring accuracy, completeness, and auditability from source to output
• Own financial and regulatory reporting (money transmission, payroll compliance) across core business and new products, exercising independent judgment on how reporting should be structured, validated, and maintained
• Design and implement AI-powered workflows across reporting, analysis, and controls: evaluating where AI can be trusted, where human judgment is required, and raising the bar on what this function produces
• Direct the design of data controls and documentation standards across financial reporting and compliance workflows, guiding new approaches as audit requirements and business complexity grow
• Lead data requirements and UAT for new product launches and financial system implementations: defining what needs to be built, evaluating whether it meets the standard, and ensuring reporting is in place before go-live
• Stay current on AI tools relevant to financial operations and analytics: evaluating and recommending new capabilities as they emerge, and establishing how they are adopted safely and effectively
• Critically evaluate AI-generated outputs: knowing when to trust them, when to question them, and how to design controls that make financial reporting defensible regardless of how it was produced

You will work across: Accounting, Data, Product Engineering, Operations, Finance Systems, Treasury, and external auditors.

Here’s what we're looking for:

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Statistics, or a related field with 6-8 years of relevant experience; 
• CPA, CA, or equivalent preferred but not required
• High-growth startup or public company experience strongly preferred
• Experience in FinTech, payments, or payroll is a plus
• Proficient in SQL: comfortable querying, investigating data discrepancies, and validating outputs directly in a data warehouse environment
• An insatiable appetite for AI. You are already experimenting, already deploying, already asking what AI can do next. You have designed and built AI-powered workflows, critically evaluated their outputs, and built controls around them. You exercise judgment on where AI can be trusted in financial reporting and where it cannot.
• Deep accounting and business context. You understand fund flows, payment lifecycles, financial close, and what audit-ready means in practice. You see the interrelationships between data, controls, and financial outcomes, and you know when something is wrong before an auditor finds it.
• Data integrity and controls experience. You have directed data integrity work in a rigorous audit environment, including completeness checks, lineage documentation, control design, and audit response.
• Independence and judgment. You determine your own methods and procedures and navigate complex issues without a clear playbook.
• Cross-functional influence. You advise and shape decisions across Engineering, Data, Accounting, Operations, and external auditors, adapting how you communicate to the audience.
• Clear communication. You translate fluently between technical findings and business language in both directions.

Our cash compensation amount for this role is between $113,190 - $139,601/year in Denver, between $137,020 - $184,977/year for New York/San Francisco. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate location, experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.