Sr. Director, Global Payroll

Position Summary

The Sr. Director, Global Payroll is responsible for the end-to-end strategy, operations, compliance, controls, funding coordination, vendor governance, and process modernization of payroll across all countries in which the organization operates. This senior leader ensures accurate, timely, compliant, and controlled payroll delivery for a global workforce while partnering closely with HR, HRSS/HRIS, Finance, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, Legal, and external vendors.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and execute the global payroll strategy, aligning payroll operations with HR, Finance, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, and Legal objectives.
• Lead, mentor, and develop a distributed global payroll team, ensuring effective workload management, cross-training, succession planning, and operational continuity.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for payroll-related risks, compliance matters, and operational issues across the organization.
• Oversee payroll processing across all countries, ensuring accuracy, timeliness, compliance, and a positive employee experience.
• Maintain compliance with global payroll regulations, including tax laws, labor requirements, statutory reporting, social security obligations, and country-specific payroll practices.
• Manage relationships with payroll vendors, employer-of-record (EOR) providers, government agencies, and local payroll partners.
• Establish and maintain a controlled global payroll operating model, including payroll calendars, approval workflows, service-level expectations, escalation paths, and process documentation.
• Coordinate payroll funding, cash requirements, payment approvals, and release schedules with Treasury while ensuring accurate reconciliation of payroll outputs.
• Partner with Accounting on payroll journal entries, accruals, reconciliations, close activities, and general ledger mapping.
• Maintain strong payroll governance and SOX-compliant internal controls, including audit readiness, segregation of duties, access reviews, change management, and documentation retention.
• Lead payroll technology initiatives, including system implementations, upgrades, integrations, vendor transitions, and payroll transformation projects.
• Drive process automation, standardization, and continuous improvement efforts to increase efficiency, scalability, and accuracy.
• Partner with HR, HRIS, Finance, Legal, Tax, Treasury, and business leaders to support organizational growth, mergers and acquisitions, workforce expansion, and new country compliance.