Finance Operations Manager - Africa Payroll Implementation & Transformation
McKinsey & Company · Chennai, India +1 · 3d ago
ManagerOn-siteCorporate Finance & FP&A
Who you'll work with
You are someone who thrives in a high-performance environment, bringing a growth mindset and entrepreneurial spirit to tackle meaningful challenges that have a real impact.
In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we’ll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities to help you quickly broaden your expertise, grow into a well-rounded professional, and contribute to work that truly makes a difference.
When you join us, you will have:
- Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
- A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
- Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
- Exceptional benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
What you'll do
You will play a critical leadership role in transforming and running multi-country payroll across the EEMA and APAC regions.
You will combine hands-on payroll transformation and implementation expertise with strong operational leadership, taking complex country payrolls from design and transition through go-live, stabilization, and high-quality steady-state delivery.
You will lead payroll transformation and managed services implementations across EEMA and APAC, partnering closely with regional Finance and HR leaders, Technology teams, and payroll providers. You will translate country requirements into robust solutions, challenge vendor designs, drive configuration and integration readiness, lead end-to-end testing and parallel payrolls, manage cutover and stabilization, and ensure that implementations meet demanding standards for accuracy, compliance, controls, employee experience, and business continuity.
Alongside transformation, you will be accountable for the ongoing health of payroll operations across your portfolio. You will govern payroll calendars and controls, manage provider performance against KPIs and SLAs, drive root-cause resolution of payroll issues, oversee statutory and regulatory readiness, strengthen SOPs and operating discipline, support internal and external audits, and ensure payroll queries and escalations are resolved with urgency and quality.
Your work requires someone who can move confidently between strategy and execution: understanding the details of payroll calculations and country requirements while also leading cross-functional programs, influencing senior stakeholders, and holding vendors and internal teams accountable for outcomes. You will help build a resilient payroll operating model that reduces manual dependency, strengthens tax and regulatory compliance, improves controls, and delivers accurate and timely pay every cycle.
You will be based in Gurugram or Chennai, as part of our Finance Global Operations - Payroll Team, with significant collaboration across EEMA and APAC time zones and travel as required for implementation and critical operational priorities.
Your background
- 10+ years of progressive payroll experience in a complex multinational or professional-services environment, with substantial hands-on responsibility for both multi-country payroll transformation/implementation and live payroll operations
- Demonstrated experience leading complex payroll implementations or transformations across multiple countries in EEMA and APAC markets; experience transitioning from in-house/SaaS payroll to managed services is highly desirable
- Deep practical knowledge of end-to-end payroll - from inputs and gross-to-net through controls, payments, accounting interfaces, statutory filings, year-end activities and post-payroll compliance - with the ability to identify risks and challenge solution designs
- Proven implementation of leadership across requirements and process design, fit-gap assessment, data migration, payroll configuration, integrations, test strategy, UAT, parallel payroll, cutover, go-live and stabilization. Experience recovering or de-risking challenging implementations is a strong advantage
- Strong multi-country payroll operations leadership, including payroll calendar governance, exception management, controls, reconciliations, issue resolution, service quality, business continuity, and employee/payroll query management
- Excellent vendor-management capability with experience governing major payroll providers or managed-services partners through clear SOWs, RACIs, KPIs, SLAs, governance forums, escalation mechanisms and performance improvement plans
- Strong understanding of payroll tax, statutory and regulatory compliance, with the judgment to engage country experts and tax advisers, translate regulatory changes into payroll actions, and ensure changes are tested and implemented on time
- Robust controls and risk mindset, with experience designing or operating payroll financial controls, supporting ICFR/SOX-style control environments, and leading remediation of internal or external audit findings
- Strong technology orientation and experience working across HRIS, payroll engines and finance systems. Working knowledge of SAP/SuccessFactors or comparable enterprise HR/payroll platforms and payroll integrations is preferred; familiarity with ServiceNow or similar case-management tools is advantageous