Director, Incentive Compensation

Confidential; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Confidential in San Francisco seeks a Senior Director of Incentive Compensation to lead enterprise-wide variable pay operations, architecture, and cross-functional compliance. This role bridges Revenue, Finance, and HR/Payroll, translating commercial designs into scalable, auditable payout structures across thousands of sales and field personnel.

The ideal candidate combines compensation execution rigor with strong financial acumen, system mastery, and leadership presence to stress-test designs,

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive experience in incentive compensation administration, FP&A, revenue operations, or sales operations within large-scale enterprise environments.
• 5+ years of formal people management experience leading commissions teams.
• Partner with GTM strategy teams to translate designs into operational executions with financial rigor.
• Deep GAAP/SOX/ASC 606 knowledge and financial control discipline.

Responsibilities

• Direct end-to-end operational governance for monthly, bi-weekly, and quarterly commissions.
• Modernize SPM/ICM tech stack and integrations with Salesforce, ERP, and Payroll systems.
• Establish formal modeling gates, approvals, and financial controls to prevent errors and leakage.
• Lead and mentor a team of commissions analysts and build a transparent, auditable process.

Skills

Incentive compensation

FP&A

Revenue operations

Sales operations

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s in Finance

MBA preferred

Tools

SQL

Python

R

Tableau

Power BI

Looker

Job description

Seeking a finance-grounded, operationally elite Senior Director, Incentive Compensation to lead, transform, and govern our enterprise-wide variable compensation operations, technical architecture, and cross-functional compliance.

While Revenue/Sales Strategy drives commercial go-to-market design and business modeling, this leader sits at the essential cross-functional nexus between Revenue, Finance, and HR/Payroll. This role acts as the enterprise operational architect, governance authority, and operationalization leader responsible for taking commercial strategies and translating them into scalable, auditable, and accurately administered commission structures. The remit spans several thousand direct, retail, and field sales professionals, channel partners, and field personnel.

The ideal leader brings deep compensation execution rigor, financial acumen, systems mastery, and leadership presence. This leader will bridge the gap between commercial strategy and financial execution—partnering directly with the Revenue Compensation Strategy team to stress-test designs against operational feasibility, establishing rigorous financial modeling gates and ASC 606/SOX controls, eliminating bespoke exceptions and payout errors, and examining third-party operating models to determine the best structure.

Strategic Imperatives & Core Priorities

• Commercial Partnership & Operational Feasibility: Serve as the primary strategic counterpart to Revenue’s Sales Strategy & Plan Modeling team. Translate high-level business designs and commercial intents into scalable, error-free operational mechanics while maintaining strict unit economics and margin guardrails.
• Plan Rationalization & Portfolio Standardization: Partner with Revenue leadership to audit, streamline, and consolidate an expansive portfolio of fragmented commission plans into standardized, repeatable frameworks that reduce plan confusion, eliminate bespoke one-off exceptions, and drive operational velocity.
• Cross-Functional Governance & Financial Guardrails: Build an institutionalized bridge between the Revenue Organization and Finance/Accounting. Establish formal modeling review gates, approval hierarchies, and robust financial controls to prevent margin leakage, double-crediting, and unearned windfalls.
• Vendor Rationalization: Assess current third-party consulting dependencies.
• Operational Excellence: Modernize calculation engines, eliminate manual shadow spreadsheets, automate end-to-end data pipelines from CRM to Payroll, and drastically reduce payment disputes and cycle times.

Strategic Operationalization & Commercial Partnership

• Serve as the principal operational and financial counterpart to the Revenue/Sales Compensation Strategy team, providing quantitative stress-testing, operational feasibility assessments, and data-backed implementation guidance for newly proposed commercial plans.
• Partner with Revenue, Retail, and Field Operations leadership to ensure strategic plans can be reliably executed, automated, and administered at scale across direct, retail, channel, and field personnel workforces.
• Evaluate proposed SPIF programs, enterprise deal splits, and specialized talent compensation structures to ensure alignment with operational capabilities, corporate unit economics, Net Present Value (NPV), and cash generation.
• Build reputational credibility, transparency, and trust across executive leadership and field sales professionals, reducing plan ambiguity and establishing clear, consistent operational standards.
• Establish and manage mandatory financial modeling review gates that all Revenue-originated plan designs and SPIFs must clear with Finance, FP&A, Accounting, Legal, etc., prior to deployment.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Legal, HR, and Compliance to ensure all plan designs, draw structures, and payout mechanics adhere to federal, state, and local wage-and-hour regulations across multi-state markets (e.g., minimum wage thresholds, overtime calculations on variable pay, advance/draw rules, and timely payout requirements).
• Institute automated anomaly detection, threshold alerting, and strict pre-payroll validation audits to ensure calculation precision, regulatory compliance, and total leakage prevention.

Operations & Technology

• Direct end-to-end operational execution for monthly, bi-weekly, and quarterly commission disbursements, ensuring timely, audit-verified payments across multi-tiered sales and operational populations.
• Modernize and optimize the Sales Performance Management (SPM/ICM) technology stack (e.g., CaptivateIQ, Xactly, Varicent, Spiff) and tighten bi-directional integrations across Salesforce, ERP (Oracle/NetSuite), and Payroll (Workday/ADP).
• Establish a modern, transparent dispute resolution protocol and rep-facing inquiry ticketing workflow governed by strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs), drastically driving down dispute volumes.
• Lead, mentor, and scale a team of commissions analysts.
• Foster a culture of analytical rigor, business partnership, high operational integrity, and continuous process improvement.
• Drive enterprise-wide enablement and change management, authoring comprehensive Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), cycle cut-off calendars, and clear field communication collateral for every plan launch.

Required Qualifications

Experience & Background

• 12+ years of progressive experience in incentive compensation administration, financial planning & analysis (FP&A), revenue operations, or sales operations within high-growth, large-scale enterprise environments.
• 5+ years of formal people management experience, with a proven track record of developing and leading commissions teams.
• Proven experience partnering directly with dedicated sales strategy/GTM teams, effectively evaluating commercial models, and translating strategic intents into flawless operational executions.
• Deep financial acumen with an understanding of corporate unit economics, gross margin dynamics, and GAAP/SOX/ASC 606 revenue and cost-recognition frameworks.
• Proven track record leading large-scale commission operational transformations, plan portfolio rationalization, or insourcing third-party administration vendors.
• Hands-on experience executing variable compensation across mixed labor forces: direct commission-based sales forces (B2C/B2B/retail) alongside operational/field labor (hourly, bonus, piecemeal, or milestone-based).

Technical & Analytical Skills

• Advanced proficiency in data querying, audit reconciliations, and complex calculation architectures (SQL, Python, R, or advanced business logic engines).
• Deep technical fluency with enterprise SPM/ICM systems (e.g., CaptivateIQ, Xactly, Spiff, CallidusCloud, Varicent) and enterprise CRMs/ERPs (Salesforce, Oracle, Workday).
• Strong capability in enterprise BI and visualization tools (Tableau, PowerBI, MicroStrategy, or Looker) to build executive variance dashboards and operational KPI tracking.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Economics, Business Administration, Data Analytics, Quantitative Engineering, or a related field.
• Master of Business Administration (MBA) or Master’s in Finance/Analytics is preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in enterprise, field service, or multi-site industries with distributed multi-thousand-person workforces.
• Strong leadership presence with the demonstrated ability to stand firm on governance, negotiate with sales leadership, and collaborate effectively with legal and finance partners.
• Exceptional strategic clarity, organizational diplomacy, and comfort operating in dynamic, high-velocity corporate environments.