Payroll Implementation Lead

About Salsa

Salsa is rebuilding the most important piece of the business stack: paying workers. We think workers should be paid faster, more easily, and more transparently, so we build next-generation payroll infrastructure for the future of work.

Salsa is an embedded fintech company. We think payroll belongs inside the tools businesses already love, so we give software platforms the APIs and infrastructure to launch their own modern payroll products. Turning every modern SaaS platform into a payroll provider will finally go after the $50bn a year that goes to legacy payroll providers. We think it's about time.

We're a team of payroll technology experts who love to build. We've worked on this problem at startup stage and at large scale, in the US and abroad. We're well-funded, ready to grow, and we love offsites in interesting corners of the world, so bring your ambition and your passport.

About the Role

Our partners sell payroll to their customers, and we make sure those employers get onboarded and paying their workers. This role starts in the trenches and grows into teaching others how to do it.

First, you'll roll up your sleeves and do the onboarding work yourself. You'll help the employers our partners sign up get set up for payroll: gathering what they need, building their accounts, and getting them to a clean first payroll. Doing the work is how you'll learn where employers get stuck, what partners misunderstand, and what a great onboarding really looks like.

Then, the role evolves into train-the-trainer. Most of our partners are software companies, not payroll companies, and their teams are often new to payroll. You'll educate those teams on onboarding best practices and the payroll knowledge they need to onboard employers on their own, using Salsa for support and guidance. You'll design the training programs, materials and exercises that make payroll concepts click for people who've never run a payroll.

We're still writing the playbook. You'll keep improving our payroll onboarding guidance and processes based on what you learn across partners and employers.

Responsibilities

Hands-on employer onboarding

• Onboard new employers end to end: company setup, federal, state and local tax accounts and rates, pay schedules, earning and deduction codes, garnishments, benefits, and worker records

• Move settings and deductions over from the employer's prior provider and confirm they're configured correctly

• Work with our migration team so each account's configuration and migrated data are ready together for first payroll

• Audit builds before go-live and catch configuration errors before they reach a paycheck

• Manage a pipeline of onboardings toward clear go-live dates, chasing down what's missing (tax IDs, registration letters, prior-provider reports) from employers and partners

• Work directly with employers by Zoom, phone or email to guide them through setup and their first payrolls

• Know where setup help ends and tax or legal advice begins, and route those questions to the right place

Training and enablement

• Design and deliver training programs that teach partner teams how to onboard employers onto payroll

• Create engaging training materials, exercises and job aids across different learning modalities: live sessions, recorded walkthroughs, written guides, hands-on practice and knowledge checks

• Explain payroll concepts in plain terms to people new to payroll, and check that the learning sticks

• Train partner onboarding and support teams, and coach them through their first months of live employers

• Review partner-built accounts, spot patterns in their mistakes, and update the training or process that caused them

Improving the model

• Turn what works across partners and employers into Salsa's standard payroll onboarding guidance and playbooks

• Keep training materials current as our product, processes and payroll rules change

• Spot where onboardings keep breaking, bring specifics to product and engineering, and help automate what should be automated

Requirements

• 5 to 7 years in payroll operations or onboarding, including 2 to 3 years training, coaching or educating people in the payroll operations domain

• Experience creating training materials and building training programs from scratch

• Experience educating people new to payroll, and making complex payroll concepts simple and practical

• Proven skill creating engaging training materials, exercises and learning modalities that people actually use

• Hands-on payroll onboarding or implementation experience, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves and do the work

• Strong working knowledge of multi-state payroll tax, pre- and post-tax deductions, benefits and retirement (including 401(k)), and garnishments

• Experience resolving payroll issues directly with employers (PTO, 401(k), deductions, garnishments, W-4s, tax discrepancies)

• Obsessive about accuracy: a payroll that's a few cents off bothers you until you find out why

• Comfortable in spreadsheets, including reviewing and uploading YTD balances and mapping settings and deduction data from other providers' reports

• Clear, patient communicator by Zoom, phone and email

• Organized enough to run many onboardings and training efforts at once in a ticketing and tracking system (we use Zendesk, Slack and Google Workspace)

• Wants the startup version of this job: less structure, more ownership, and building the process while doing the work

Nice to Have

• Experience at a payroll provider, PEO, or embedded payroll or HR platform

• Train-the-trainer experience: you've taught other trainers or team leads how to teach

• Experience with employers of 100+ workers or multi-state employers

• Comfortable in front of partner leadership, explaining what good onboarding really takes