What the Role Is
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.
Who You Are
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.
Direct experience with California or New York employment law is a strong plus. These are our two most demanding states — same-day final pay, pay data reporting, and local rules that change often. It's learnable, but if you've run compliance in either, you'll ramp much faster.
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. You test against known-good output, build in the checks that show it's still running clean, and leave a written SOP behind. You reach for AI naturally to move faster — at Babylist, every team uses it daily.
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. You 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. CPP, FPC, SHRM-CP, SHRM-SCP, PHR, or SPHR aren't required, but any would cement your expertise.
How You Will Make An Impact
You'll run two payroll cycles end to end — weekly for our 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.
You'll audit every pre-process register before funding and work discrepancies with Newfront until they're resolved.
You'll be the person employees reach when a paycheck doesn't make sense — questions answered or routed within one business day.
You'll 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.
You'll run screenings that hold up under review: background check review and escalation, plus quarterly health exclusion checks.
You'll 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.
You'll design the internal controls across payroll and compliance and keep the evidence trail current — the same trail that carries our annual workers' compensation and external financial audits.
You'll build automation and prove it works — skills, scheduled tasks, and workflow tooling, tested against known-good…