Manager, Payroll Operations

The Manager, Payroll Operations is responsible for ensuring accurate, compliant, and timely payroll delivery across a defined portfolio of countries or regions. This role combines people leadership with operational ownership, enabling your team to consistently meet or exceed payroll expectations while developing their skills and capabilities.

As part of the Global Payroll Operations leadership group, you will lead a team of payroll specialists, supporting them through complex operational challenges and helping them prioritize work to maximize impact. You are accountable for translating strategic guidance into clear operational expectations, ensuring the team is aligned to processes, knowledge, and support needed to execute at a high level.

This role requires balancing oversight and autonomy: you drive resolution of escalated payroll issues, apply policies consistently, recommend hiring and performance decisions, and partner with cross-functional stakeholders. At the same time, you foster a high-performing, engaged team capable of delivering results reliably and scaling their impact as the business grows.

You will also contribute to critical global payroll implementation initiatives, providing market-specific expertise and operational input to ensure new country launches, vendor transitions, or process in-housing efforts succeed and maintain operational excellence.

What you bring

• Proven experience owning payroll outcomes for a team in regional or multi-country environments.
• Demonstrated people leadership capability, including coaching, feedback, and performance input.
• Comfortable leading investigations and driving operational resolution.
• Able to clarify and consistently apply policies and controls.
• Experience recommending hiring profiles, team changes, and performance actions.
• Strong operational judgment with the ability to balance speed, accuracy, and customer impact.
• Clear, structured written and verbal communicator, particularly effective in async environments.
• Experience working in remote-first or globally distributed teams is a strong advantage.
• Fluent in English; additional languages are a plus.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Performance

• Own payroll outcomes for your team, holding accountability for accuracy, timeliness, and compliance within your scope.
• Provide coaching, feedback, and day-to-day leadership to your assigned team of payroll specialists
• Lead operational investigations into payroll issues and drive resolution within defined authority.
• Provide input into performance ratings and recommend performance actions when required.
• Foster a psychologically safe, high-accountability team environment.

Payroll Operations Ownership

• Own end-to-end payroll delivery for a defined group of countries, ensuring regulatory compliance and operational consistency.
• Sustain operational working knowledge of country-specific payroll requirements within your scope.
• Ensure payroll processes are followed, documented, and auditable.
• Manage relationships with external payroll vendors relevant to your portfolio.

Global Payroll Implementations

• Actively support critical global payroll implementation initiatives, including new country launches, vendor transitions, or in-housing efforts.
• Contribute market- and country-specific payroll expertise to ensure implementations are operationally sound and sustainable.
• Identify execution risks early and partner with implementation and cross-functional teams to mitigate them.
• Own payroll outcomes for your scope post-launch, ensuring stability after go-live.

Operational Excellence & Improvement

• Identify operational risks, recurring issues, and process gaps within your payroll scope.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives that increase efficiency, reduce errors, and improve team capacity.
• Support the rollout of new tools, automation, and standardized workflows.
• Track and contribute to KPIs, service levels, and quality metrics.
• Manage operational support for service arm of the business - including team performance and engagement in Zendesk

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with People Operations, Finance, Legal, Product, and Service Operations to support effective payroll delivery.
• Translate payroll complexity into clear, actionable guidance for stakeholders.
• Communicate proactively on risks, delays, or changes that may impact payroll outcomes.