Senior Payroll & Compensation Specialist

This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role for someone with deep payroll expertise and meaningful experience supporting compensation processes. You don’t need to be a career compensation expert, but you should understand how compensation programs work, be comfortable benchmarking roles using market data and compensation tools, and be excited to deepen your expertise as we continue building a thoughtful, scalable compensation framework.

What You’ll Do

Payroll Operations & Compliance

• Own and independently process regular, off-cycle, special, and final payrolls in Rippling for employees across 20+ states, ensuring accurate, timely, and compliant pay.
• Audit payroll inputs and results, including employee changes, timekeeping, deductions, garnishments, reimbursements, bonuses, PTO payouts, and other payroll-impacting activity.
• Manage international contractor setup and payments across multiple countries, including documentation, corrections, and issue resolution.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for payroll questions, independently researching and resolving pay, withholding, deduction, and other payroll issues.
• Maintain current knowledge of federal, state, and local payroll requirements, including wage payment, final pay, payroll tax, deductions, garnishments, and recordkeeping.
• Own payroll tax registrations and account maintenance across applicable jurisdictions, including agency notices, corrections, and quarter-end and year-end activities.
• Serve as the internal Rippling Payroll subject-matter expert, maintaining payroll workflows, controls, documentation, and system configurations while driving process improvements.

Compensation Administration & Analysis

• Partner with the Director of HR to administer and strengthen the company’s compensation framework, including job levels, salary ranges, geographic pay practices, and related processes.
• Benchmark roles using Payscale and other market data, evaluating job scope, level, geography, and internal context to support consistent compensation recommendations.
• Support job leveling and pricing by reviewing responsibilities, organizational scope, market benchmarks, and internal comparisons.
• Maintain compensation data, salary ranges, market benchmarks, job-leveling records, and supporting documentation.
• Support annual compensation planning and review cycles, including data preparation, market analysis, manager resources, system administration, reporting, and implementation.
• Analyze compensation data to identify market positioning, internal equity considerations, pay trends, and potential inconsistencies to support HR decision-making.
• Administer approved promotions, market adjustments, bonuses, and other compensation changes, ensuring accurate documentation, HRIS updates, and payroll execution.

Reporting, Controls & Partnership

• Prepare payroll reconciliations, funding information, approval packages, journal entry support, compensation reports, and audit-ready documentation.
• Identify recurring payroll or compensation errors, trends, and control gaps and implement practical improvements to strengthen accuracy and data integrity.
• Partner across HR, Finance, Compliance, and business leaders to ensure payroll and compensation processes remain accurate, compliant, and scalable as the organization grows.