Senior Payroll Operations Specialist - UK & Ireland

Justworks; City Of London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading HR solutions provider in London seeks a Senior Payroll Operations Specialist for the UK & Ireland. The successful candidate will manage payroll operations, ensuring compliance with local laws. Candidates should have at least 5 years of payroll experience, strong analytical skills, and a payroll qualification. This role offers a collaborative and dynamic work environment with competitive benefits.

Benefits

Great benefits

Wellness program offerings

Company retreats

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in payroll or operations.
• Experience managing payroll processes across UK and Ireland.
• Knowledge of UK PAYE, National Insurance, and Irish PRSI requirements.

Responsibilities

• Execute payroll processing for the UK and Ireland.
• Resolve payroll-related inquiries.
• Ensure compliance with HMRC and Revenue regulations.

Skills

Attention to detail

Analytical skills

Clear communication

Flexibility

Problem-solving

Education

Payroll qualification (CIPP/IPASS)

Job description

Overview

Who We Are: At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.

We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.

Our Values

If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.

Who You Are

As a Senior Payroll Operations Specialist – UK & Ireland on the International team, you will be responsible for ensuring the accuracy, timeliness, and compliance of payroll for employees across both countries. You will work across the organization to research, troubleshoot, and resolve a variety of payroll-related inquiries, ensuring that all payroll matters—ranging from calculations to tax submissions and statutory filings—are handled with precision.

In this role, you will play a key part in maintaining seamless payroll operations by proactively identifying discrepancies, reconciling payroll data, and ensuring compliance with UK and Irish legislation. You are highly detail-oriented, with a strong ability to analyze payroll data, resolve issues efficiently, and uphold the highest standards of accuracy.

You excel at working independently and thrive in environments where you can build processes from the ground up. With a strong ability to design and implement payroll workflows, you will ensure efficiency and accuracy in payroll execution. Your expertise will be critical in ensuring payroll runs smoothly, resolving any complications as they arise, and continuously optimizing operational processes to maintain excellence in UK and Irish payroll execution.

Your Success Profile

What You Will Work On

• Execute day-to-day operations for Justworks' UK and Ireland payroll systems, including processing and reviewing payroll, handling corrections, and ensuring compliance with HMRC and Revenue regulations.
• Monitor payroll payments, triage, and resolve incoming payroll-related issues efficiently.
• Perform payroll reconciliation, ensuring accuracy in statutory deductions, tax payments, and reporting while identifying and resolving discrepancies.
• Maintain a comprehensive understanding of UK and Irish payroll tax laws, staying up to date on legislative changes and applying this knowledge to support complex payroll decisions.
• Implement and refine payroll workflows to support evolving UK and Ireland operations, ensuring efficiency and compliance with regulatory requirements.
• Identify and address areas of inefficiency in payroll execution, leveraging process improvements and system enhancements to optimize operations.
• Act as a payroll subject matter expert, providing guidance and support to internal teams such as Customer Success and Finance.
• Maintain internal payroll operations resources, policies, and procedures, ensuring accuracy and relevance in the UK and Ireland context.
• Manage statutory tasks including processing tax codes, National Insurance and PRSI contributions, P45/P60 forms, and BIK (Benefits in Kind).
• Support year-end reconciliation and reporting processes, ensuring timely and accurate submission of documents such as P11D (UK) and year-end statements (Ireland).
• Partner with the Audit and Accounting teams to continuously improve payroll controls and compliance measures.

How You Will Do Your Work

As a Senior Payroll Operations Specialist – UK & Ireland, how results are achieved is paramount for your success and ultimately result in our success as an organization. In this role, your foundational knowledge, skills, abilities and personal attributes are anchored in the following competencies:

• Detail-oriented – exercises extreme attention to detail; is thorough, accurate, organized, and productive and seeks to understand both the cause and effect of a situation.
• Adaptability – the ability to adjust your approach or actions in response to changes in your external environment.
• Good judgment – the exercise of critical thinking, analyzing and assessing problems and implications, identifying patterns, making connections of underlying issues, understanding risks and developing mitigation strategies, and taking ownership of the outcome.
• Clear communication – the ability to articulate thoughts and express ideas effectively using oral, written, visual and non-verbal communication skills, as well as listening skills to gain understanding.
• Systems thinking – the ability to look at overall systems holistically and understand how things work within the system through the exploration of inter-dependencies and inter-relationships (context and connections).

In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for:

• Camaraderie - Day to day you can be seen working together toward a higher purpose. You like to have fun. You’re an active listener, treat people respectfully, and have a strong desire to know and help others.
• Openness - Your default is to be open. You're willing to share information, understand other perspectives, and consider new possibilities. You’re curious, ask open questions, and are receptive to thoughts and feedback from others.
• Grit - You demonstrate grit by having the courage to commit and persevere. You’re committed, earnest, and dive in to get the job done well with a positive attitude.
• Integrity - Simply put, do what you say and say what you'll do. You’re honest and forthright, have a strong moral compass, and strive to match your words with your actions while leading by example.
• Simplicity - Be like Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in payroll, operations, or related fields, including at least 2 years of hands-on experience managing the full end-to-end payroll process for employees across the UK and/or Ireland. This includes payroll calculations, execution, tax reconciliation, and reporting, ensuring accuracy and compliance at every stage.
• Recognized payroll qualification such as CIPP (UK) or IPASS (Ireland) is a strong plus.
• Demonstrable working knowledge of UK PAYE, National Insurance, P11D/BIK, and statutory payments, as well as Irish PRSI, USC, and income tax requirements.
• Familiarity with basic business process management activities (process mapping, improvement, implementation, etc.)
• Aptitude for quickly learning new products and subject matter.
• Meticulous and detail-oriented; you pride yourself in finding mistakes or errors and putting measures in place to prevent these.
• Ability to remain flexible and pragmatic under pressure with an ability to thrive in a changing and complex environment.

Actual compensation is based on multiple factors that are unique to each candidate, including and not limited to skill set, level of relevant experience, and specific work location. Salary ranges for positions based in other locations may differ based on the cost of labor in that location.

For more information about Justworks’ Total Reward Philosophy, including all of the perks and benefits we are proud to offer our team members, please visit Total Rewards @ Justworks.

Diversity At Justworks

Justworks is committed to maintaining a workplace where diversity of identity, culture, and life experience is the norm and is celebrated authentically and respected consistently. Diversity in our work, our people, and our product drives creativity and innovation, entrepreneurial leadership and integrity, competitiveness, and collaboration throughout our business and in the market. We depend on our differences to make our team stronger, our workplace more dynamic, and our product accessible to all of our customers.

We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer open to all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or familial status, disability, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status. Justworks is fully dedicated to providing necessary support to candidates with disabilities who may require reasonable accommodations. We also provide reasonable accommodations to employees based on their sincerely held religious beliefs, as well as for other covered reasons consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws. If you're in need of a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at [e-mail]. Your comfort and success matter to us, and we're here to ensure an inclusive experience.

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