Manager, Payroll Operations - Eastern Europe

What this job can offer you

The Manager, Payroll Operations is responsible for ensuring accurate, compliant, and timely payroll delivery across a defined portfolio of countries or regions. This role combines people leadership with operational ownership, enabling your team to consistently meet or exceed payroll expectations while developing their skills and capabilities.

As part of the Global Payroll Operations leadership group, you will lead a team of payroll specialists, supporting them through complex operational challenges and helping them prioritize work to maximize impact. You are accountable for translating strategic guidance into clear operational expectations, ensuring the team is aligned to processes, knowledge, and support needed to execute at a high level.

This role requires balancing oversight and autonomy: you drive resolution of escalated payroll issues, apply policies consistently, recommend hiring and performance decisions, and partner with cross-functional stakeholders. At the same time, you foster a high-performing, engaged team capable of delivering results reliably and scaling their impact as the business grows.

You will also contribute to critical global payroll implementation initiatives, providing market-specific expertise and operational input to ensure new country launches, vendor transitions, or process in-housing efforts succeed and maintain operational excellence.

What you bring

Proven experience owning payroll outcomes for a team in regional or multi-country environments.

Demonstrated people leadership capability, including coaching, feedback, and performance input.

Comfortable leading investigations and driving operational resolution.

Able to clarify and consistently apply policies and controls.

Experience recommending hiring profiles, team changes, and performance actions.

Strong operational judgment with the ability to balance speed, accuracy, and customer impact.

Clear, structured written and verbal communicator, particularly effective in async environments.

Experience working in remote-first or globally distributed teams is a strong advantage.

Fluent in English; additional languages are a plus.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Performance

Own payroll outcomes for your team, holding accountability for accuracy, timeliness, and compliance within your scope.

Provide coaching, feedback, and day-to-day leadership to your assigned team of payroll specialists

Lead operational investigations into payroll issues and drive resolution within defined authority.

Provide input into performance ratings and recommend performance actions when required.

Foster a psychologically safe, high-accountability team environment.

Payroll Operations Ownership

Own end-to-end payroll delivery for a defined group of countries, ensuring regulatory compliance and operational consistency.

Sustain operational working knowledge of country-specific payroll requirements within your scope.

Ensure payroll processes are followed, documented, and auditable.

Manage relationships with external payroll vendors relevant to your portfolio.

Global Payroll Implementations

Actively support critical global payroll implementation initiatives, including new country launches, vendor transitions, or in-housing efforts.

Contribute market- and country-specific payroll expertise to ensure implementations are operationally sound and sustainable.

Identify execution risks early and partner with implementation and cross-functional teams to mitigate them.

Own payroll outcomes for your scope post-launch, ensuring stability after go-live.

Operational Excellence & Improvement

Identify operational risks, recurring issues, and process gaps within your payroll scope.

Drive continuous improvement initiatives that increase efficiency, reduce errors, and improve team capacity.

Support the rollout of new tools, automation, and standardized workflows.

Track and contribute to KPIs, service levels, and quality metrics.

Manage operational support for service arm of the business - including team performance and engagement in Zendesk

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Partner with People Operations, Finance, Legal, Product, and Service Operations to support effective payroll delivery.

Translate payroll complexity into clear, actionable guidance for stakeholders.

Communicate proactively on risks, delays, or changes that may impact payroll outcomes.

Practicals

Reports to: Senior Manager, or Manager, Payroll Operations

Team: Payroll Operations

Location: Anywhere in the world

Start date: As soon as possible

Application process

Async profile review

Interview with Recruiter

Interview with Hiring Manager

Interview with Senior Director, Payroll Operations

Bar Raiser Interview

Prior employment verification check

Async offer

Remote's Total Rewards philosophy is to ensure fair, unbiased compensation and fair equity pay along with competitive benefits in all locations in which we operate. We do not agree to or encourage cheap-labor practices and therefore we ensure to pay above in-location rates. We hope to inspire other companies to support global talent-hiring and bring local wealth to developing countries.

At first glance our salary bands seem quite wide - here is some context. At Remote we have international operations and a globally distributed workforce.  We use geo ranges to consider geographic pay differentials as part of our global compensation strategy to remain competitive in various markets while we hiring globally.

Our salary ranges are determined by role, level and location, and our job titles may span more than one career level. The actual base pay for the successful candidate in this role is dependent upon many factors such as location, transferable or job-related skills, work experience, relevant training, business needs, and market demands. The base salary range may be subject to change.

At Remote, we foster internal mobility as a key element of our culture of employee growth and development, supported by a compensation philosophy that guarantees pay equity and fairness. Therefore, all compensation changes associated with an internal move will be reviewed by the Total Rewards & People Enablement team on a case by case basis.

The annual salary range for this full-time position is

206 300 zł—232 100 zł PLN