Senior Payroll & Compliance Specialist

As our Senior Payroll & Compliance Specialist, you'll own the most tangible ways we look after our team: paying people correctly and staying compliant in a fast-changing regulatory environment. You'll do that for a distributed workforce of 600–1,000 employees across ~35 states, 300+ of them nonexempt/hourly. You'll report to our People Operations Manager and work most closely with People Ops, Accounting, and our payroll partner, Newfront — owning our U.S. compliance calendar end to end (45+ recurring obligations a year across about a dozen jurisdictions), with real room to redesign the steps that slow us down. If you've supported complex, multi-state payroll for a large nonexempt workforce, take pride in getting it right, and like being the steady hand behind the scenes, this role will energize you.

Responsibilities

Run two payroll cycles end to end — weekly for the fulfillment center and hourly showroom teams, bi-weekly for corporate and salaried showroom — handling every change for a large hourly population: new hires, terminations, clawbacks, corrections, direct deposit updates, and ad-hoc termination pay; Audit every pre-process register before funding and work discrepancies with Newfront until resolved; Be the person employees reach when a paycheck doesn't make sense — questions answered or routed within one business day; Own the U.S. compliance calendar through annual filings — EEO-1, CA Pay Data, and OSHA 300 across corporate, both showrooms, and the fulfillment center — and translate legislative change across ~35 states into the handful of actions that actually apply, then brief the People team; Run screenings that hold up under review: background check review and escalation, plus quarterly health exclusion checks; Take point on the annual Compliance Refresh each February, chasing it to 100% completion across every eligible employee and contractor, and partner with Legal and outside counsel on handbook and policy review every two years; Design internal controls across payroll and compliance and keep the evidence trail current — the same trail that carries annual workers' compensation and external financial audits; Build automation and prove it works — skills, scheduled tasks, and workflow tooling, tested against known-good output and instrumented so it is still running clean; Build SOPs

Requirements

You run multi-state U.S. payroll end to end in an enterprise HRIS (Paylocity or comparable) — inputs, timecard corrections, off-cycle and termination pay, garnishments, and final review before funding; You've owned a compliance calendar covering EEO-1, OSHA, nondiscrimination testing, and state reporting — plus background checks, I-9 review, required trainings, and policy creation and revision; You surface deadlines before they're urgent; You turn legal redlines into usable policy; You've worked with Legal and outside counsel on handbook language and translated it into something employees will actually follow; You improve a process, then prove it — test against known-good output, build in checks that show it's still running clean, and leave a written SOP behind; You reach for AI naturally to move faster; You can explain a paycheck to the person who earned it, and the numbers to the people who sign off on them; You hold a deadline, plan backward from the pay date and the filing date, stay responsive during processing windows, and raise a flag early when a date is at risk; You have 5–8 years in payroll and compliance, including 3+ years running multi-state U.S. payroll

Nice to have

Direct experience with California or New York employment law; CPP, FPC, SHRM-CP, SHRM-SCP, PHR, or SPHR certification

Benefits

Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance; Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts; Generous paid parental leave and PTO; Winter Wonder Week: the whole company takes a paid week off at the end of the year; Remote work stipend to set up your office; Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning; Competitive pay and meaningful opportunities for career advancement; Leading tools like Claude and ChatGPT from day one