Manager, Payroll Operations - Sub Saharan
Remote · Remote · South Africa · 16d ago
About Remote
With Innovation as one of the core values, we have built Automation and AI capabilities into the requirements for every role.
We encourage every member of the Remote team to bring their talents, experiences and culture to the table to help us build the best-in-class HR platform.
What this job can offer you
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
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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.
Practicals
- Reports to: Senior Manager, or Manager, Payroll Operations
- Team: Payroll Operations
- Location: Anywhere in the world
- Start date: As soon as possible
Application process
- Async profile review
- Interview with recruiter
- Interview with Hiring Manager
- Interview with Senior Director, Payroll Operations
- Bar Raiser Interview
- Async offer
- Prior employment verification check
#LI-DNP
Remote's Total Rewards philosophy is to ensure fair, unbiased compensation and fair equity pay along with competitive benefits in all locations in which we operate. We do not agree to or encourage cheap-labor practices and therefore we ensure to pay above in-location rates. We hope to inspire other companies to support global talent-hiring and bring local wealth to developing countries.
At first glance our salary bands seem quite wide - here is some context. At Remote we have international operations and a globally distributed workforce. We use geo ranges to consider geographic pay differentials as part of our global compensation strategy to remain competitive in various markets while we hiring globally.
Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location, and our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay for the successful candidate in this role is dependent upon many factors such as location, transferable or job-related skills, work experience, relevant training, business needs, and market demands. The base salary range may be subject to change.
At Remote, we foster internal mobility as a key element of our culture of employee growth and development, supported by a compensation philosophy that guarantees pay equity and fairness. Therefore, all compensation changes associated with an internal move will be reviewed by the Total Rewards & People Enablement team on a case by case basis.
Benefits
- work from anywhere
- flexible paid time off
- flexible working hours (we are async)
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- budget towards co-working spaces, learning and wellness (including gym memberships)
- mental health support services
- stock options
- home office budget & IT equipment
How you’ll plan your day (and life)
We work async at Remote which means you can plan your schedule around your life (and not around meetings). Read more at remote.com/async.
You will be empowered to take ownership and be proactive. When in doubt you will default to action instead of waiting. Your life-work balance is important and you will be encouraged to put yourself and your family first, and fit work around your needs.
If that sounds like something you want, apply now!
How to apply
- Please fill out the form below and upload your CV with a PDF format.
- We kindly ask you to submit your application and CV in English, as this is the standardised language we use here at Remote.
- If you don’t have an up to date CV but you are still interested in talking to us, please feel free to add a copy of your LinkedIn profile instead.
Not only do we encourage folks from all ethnic groups, genders, sexuality, age, abilities, disability status and any other under-represented group to apply, but we prioritize a sense of belonging. We have 4 ERGs (Women, Disability, Queer, Minorities in Tech) who meet regularly with the People team. During your interviews and beyond, we ask & encourage anybody who needs an accommodation to request one from their recruiter.
We will ask you to voluntarily tell us your pronouns at interview stage, and you will have the option to answer our anonymous demographic questionnaire when you apply below. As an equal employment opportunity employer it’s important to us that our workforce reflects people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences and this data will help us to stay accountable. We thank you for providing this data, if you chose to.
At Remote, we embrace AI as a valuable tool while prioritizing human creativity and authenticity. We look forward to meeting candidates who balance innovation with genuine expertise and experience. To learn more about Remote's AI guidelines check see here.
Please note we accept applications on an ongoing basis.