Payroll Operations Manager, (Americas) at Oyster

The Payroll Operations Manager, (Americas) is a technically credible people leader who will shape and scale payroll operations across the Americas region. This role requires deep US and Canada payroll expertise, working knowledge of key Latin American markets, strong equity-payroll knowledge, and an automation-first approach to growth.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and develop experienced payroll individual contributors (ICs) through clear goals, candid feedback, thoughtful delegation, and effective performance management.
• Act as the technical escalation point for complex US and Canada payroll matters and provide informed coverage across Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and emerging Americas markets.
• Own operational escalations, customer calls, root-cause analysis, risk identification, and durable corrective actions.
• Manage vendor outcomes, SLAs, controls, scorecards, and accountability; challenge recommendations when needed.
• Build scalable processes, documentation, coverage plans, metrics, and operating rhythms.
• Partner across Product, Finance, Accounting, Legal, and Lifecycle Operations to solve end-to-end problems.
• Drive automation, standardization, simplification, delegation, and elimination of low-value manual work.
• Support Americas expansion while sustaining payroll accuracy, timeliness, compliance, and customer trust.

Core Requirements:

• Deep US and Canada payroll expertise, including multi-state and provincial compliance.
• Practical exposure to Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia payroll operations.
• Strong equity-payroll knowledge.
• Expertise in payroll controls, reconciliation, risk, escalation management, root-cause analysis, and SLA/KPI ownership.
• Proven vendor-management and vendor-accountability experience.
• Experience leading senior, experienced payroll ICs without micromanaging.
• Evidence of process improvement with concrete, measurable outcomes.
• Remote or distributed people-leadership experience.
• Ability to move fluently between technical detail and regional strategy in an ambiguous, scaling environment.

Bonus / Nice-to-Have Experience:

• Deep Latin America payroll experience.
• Puerto Rico, Guam, or other US-territory payroll knowledge.
• EOR or global employment experience.
• In-house payroll implementation or vendor-to-in-house migration experience.
• Payroll transformation and Product or Technology partnership experience.
• Advanced practical use of AI and automation in payroll operations.