Senior Product Manager, Payroll Platform

Description

This is a remote role, open to candidates in the state listed on the job posting.

The company builds a people intelligence platform for HR. This role owns the systems that run payroll, including data sync, calculation, payment operations tools, and the data model beneath them.

Payroll must build on the company's shared platform services: canonical data entities, a permission service, an event bus, and an observability stack. Payroll is held to the contracts those services publish.

A typical week might involve ordering a migration step so no client's payday is the test, aligning the payroll data model direction with payroll engineering leadership, or estimating what it costs to keep an old system running one more quarter. The new platform is still maturing while the old system handles production load.

The company uses AI tools in its workflows and is looking for curious, forward-thinking people who want to explore how AI can improve their work. Candidates can read the company's AI guidelines for details on how AI is used in recruiting and what is not allowed.

Responsibilities

• Decide which functions move from old operational tools to their replacements, and when, sequencing each step so payroll is never at risk.
• Estimate the cost of running old systems, including support escalations, manual fixes, and the risk of a missed pay date.
• Own the product side of the payroll data-model redesign, comparing event-driven streaming with the current full-resync approach. Work jointly with payroll engineering leadership and validate the design against canonical entity models using real client examples.
• Own access and audit controls for payroll systems: permission granularity, audit posture, least-privilege exceptions, deny-by-default rollouts, and feature-flag discipline. Work with the security organization and use the platform's existing methods for recording who did what.
• Own payroll compliance and retention: data retention positions, regulatory changes affecting payroll systems, and the audit relationship with governance, risk, and compliance. Record each position as a documented decision.
• Test long-held assumptions about what payroll systems can and cannot do. Publish the real limits and latency curves in writing so leadership can act on them.
• Run the payroll roadmap: a quarterly plan with dates, a weekly written status for leadership, and coordination with payroll services on operational readiness.
• First 180 days: deliver a dated plan to retire the old systems, with the cost of each one priced, and retire at least one with no payroll incident.
• First 180 days: record the payroll data-model direction as a written decision agreed with engineering.
• First 180 days: make payroll's permission and audit setup the reference model other internal tools copy.
• First 180 days: complete canonical-model validation for each payroll domain so payroll builds against platform contracts by default.

Requirements

• Share the company's values.
• 5+ years of product management experience. Experience in HCM, payroll, or payroll-adjacent platforms is strongly preferred.
• Experience coordinating with downstream consumers at scale, such as dozens of teams reading one system's contracts.
• Rollout discipline as a habit: parallel runs, instant rollback, user acceptance testing, and release trains.
• Enough technical depth to discuss database schemas, APIs, and migration mechanics with engineers as a peer.
• Comfort working in regulated, sensitive-data domains, with compliance teams treated as partners.
• Evidence-based habits: measure before you assert, and write decisions down, in a field full of inherited assumptions.
• Flag risks before deadlines arrive.
• Would make us REALLY love you (not required): experience stewarding a legacy enterprise platform through a successor migration; payments, money-movement, or banking-file operations experience; familiarity with event-driven data architectures that replace batch and resync patterns; a developer background.

Conditions

Remote, in the state listed on the job posting.

Employment is contingent on passing a background check and a credit check.

Equal opportunity employer. Reasonable accommodations are available during the hiring process on request.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance.
• 4 weeks of vacation, 12 company holidays, parental leave, and volunteer time off.
• 401k with up to 6% company match.
• $2000 paid vacation bonus.
• Employee assistance program through Headspace.