Staff Product Manager - Payroll Experience

Deel; Portugal; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Deel is hiring a Staff Product Manager to own a significant slice of the payroll experience. You will lead two engineering squads and shape the end-to-end client payroll workflow across countries, focusing on low-touch, high-confidence, high-accuracy outcomes.

You’ll operate with autonomy, analyze data, interview clients and operators, and push for an opinionated, scalable framework that improves how clients run payroll globally.

Responsibilities

• Own the vision, strategy, and metrics for your part of the payroll experience with two squads.
• Question how payroll is currently done; design a simpler, more reliable flow for clients with varying payroll expertise.
• Build global frameworks to deliver country-specific requirements as configurable blocks, not bespoke builds.
• Own dashboards and early-warning systems to surface risk and drive continuous improvement.
• Translate complexity into clean, well-scoped work by collaborating with clients, payroll operations, and engineers.

Skills

Product management

Stakeholder management

Data-driven decision making

Systems thinking

Job description

Who We Are Is What We Do.

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Our vision is to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly.

Who We Are Is What We Do.

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Our vision is to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly.

Among the largest globally distributed companies in the world, our team of 7,000 spans more than 100 countries, speaks 74 languages, and brings a connected and dynamic culture that drives continuous learning and innovation for our customers.

Why should you be part of our success story?

As the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) company in history, Deel is transforming how global talent connects with world-class companies – breaking down borders that have traditionally limited both hiring and career opportunities. We're not just building software; we're creating the infrastructure for the future of work, enabling a more diverse and inclusive global economy. In 2024 alone, we paid $11.2 billion to workers in nearly 100 currencies and provided healthcare and benefits to workers in 109 countries—ensuring people get paid and protected, no matter where they are.

Our momentum is reflected in our achievements and customer satisfaction: CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Fast 500, and repeated recognition on Y Combinator's top companies list – all while maintaining a 4.83 average rating from 15,000 reviews across G2, Trustpilot, Captera, Apple and Google.

Your experience at Deel will be a career accelerator. At the forefront of the global work revolution, you'll tackle complex challenges that impact millions of people's working lives. With our momentum—backed by a $17.3 billion valuation and $1 B in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in just over five years—you'll drive meaningful impact while building expertise that makes you a sought‑after leader in the transformation of global work.

About The Role

Payroll still assumes expertise on the client side: someone in the business knows local rules, knows what to check, and knows when a number's wrong. We think that assumption should change.

The Payroll Experience team owns the client-facing surface of payroll at Deel, and we're building toward an experience that is low-touch, high-confidence, high-flexibility, and high-accuracy. A client payroll user—with or without payroll expertise—should be able to run payroll end-to-end themselves, in any country, and know it's right before they approve it. That includes global frameworks that let local country experiences plug in without rebuilds, and it extends all the way through to statutory obligations like filing to governments.

We're hiring a Staff PM to own a significant slice of that surface and two engineering squads to build it.

The scope is large

Payroll is complex: multi-jurisdiction rules, real money, real deadlines, real legal exposure. The industry has spent decades building around that complexity rather than removing it. What's needed is someone who can map the landscape and come back with an opinionated view of what to change, what to build, what to automate, and why.

You won't get a pre-defined backlog. You won't get heavy direction on what to build. You'll operate with real autonomy. You'll dig into data, sit with clients and payroll operators, validate assumptions, think in systems, and come back with a clear point of view. Then you'll drive it.

This is a high-ownership role in a high-pace environment—and one of the highest-leverage roles in Payroll. What you ship is felt by every client, every cycle.

What you'll do

• Own the vision, strategy, and metrics for your part of the payroll experience. Two engineering squads, one problem space, a mandate to have a point of view about where it goes. You'll set the direction, defend it when people push back, and iterate based on what you learn.
• Challenge how payroll is currently done. Your starting assumption: most of the manual work, double-checking, and dependency on payroll expertise is removable. You'll interrogate the existing flow rather than optimize it. Ask what the client is actually trying to achieve and what the shortest path to correct payroll looks like if we designed it today. Your primary customer is a client payroll admin—someone with deep payroll knowledge or almost none. The experience has to work for both: expert controls where they're wanted, confident defaults and clear guidance where they're not. Flexibility without complexity is the hard part.
• Build global frameworks that enable local experiences. Payroll is local by nature and global by ambition. You'll push for frameworks and abstractions that let country-specific requirements be delivered as configuration rather than bespoke builds—so our experience can scale globally.
• Own the metrics that matter. Define what good looks like: touchless payroll rate, accuracy and correction volume, time to submit, self-serve coverage by country, filing success rate, support contact per payroll run. Build the dashboards and early-warning systems that surface risk before a cycle breaks. Track them live and close the gaps relentlessly.
• Translate complexity into clean, well-scoped work. You'll sit between clients, payroll operations,