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 get those employers set up and paying their workers. In this role you build those employer accounts yourself, from the first intake call through first payroll.

Most of these employers are small and midsize businesses: restaurants, salons, clinics, home care agencies and similar, from a handful of workers up to about 150, sometimes across several states. The work is detailed. Every deduction, 401(k) contribution and benefit has to be set up right, because a setup mistake ends up on someone’s paycheck. If you like getting a build exactly right and catching the problem before anyone else sees it, you’ll like this job.

Responsibilities

• Build employer accounts end to end: company setup, federal, state and local tax accounts and rates, pay schedules, earning codes and worker records

• Set up deductions with the right pre- and post-tax treatment, including 401(k) and other retirement plans (deferrals, employer match, catch-up, loan repayments), health and other benefit deductions, and garnishments

• Use the employer’s prior-provider reports to map their earnings, deductions and benefits into Salsa, and confirm each one is configured correctly

• Check every build before go-live: run test payrolls, compare them against the prior provider’s registers, and fix differences before the first real payroll

• Work with our migration team so each account’s setup and its YTD data are ready at the same time

• Keep many onboardings moving toward their go-live dates, and chase down what’s missing (tax IDs, SUI rate notices, plan documents, prior-provider reports) from employers and partners

• Walk employers through setup and their first payrolls by Zoom, phone and email

• Send tax and legal questions to the right people instead of answering them yourself

• Flag setups that keep going wrong, and help fix the checklist, product or process behind them

Requirements

• 3+ years of hands-on payroll implementation at a payroll provider, PEO or embedded payroll platform, building accounts for many employers. In-house payroll for a single employer doesn’t count for this role.

• You’ve personally set up dozens of employers and can tell us roughly how many and how big

• Strong working knowledge of pre- and post-tax deductions, 401(k) and benefit deductions, and garnishments

• Experience setting up state and local tax accounts, including for multi-state employers

• Careful with detail: you check your own work, and when numbers don’t tie you find out why

• Comfortable in spreadsheets, including reading other providers’ payroll registers and deduction reports and mapping them into a new system

• Clear, patient communicator by Zoom, phone and email

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

• Happy at a startup, where a lot of the process is still being written