Payroll Operations Lead - Remote & Process Excellence

Check; United States; Remote; USD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Check is building payroll infrastructure to empower businesses to pay people accurately and compliantly. As Payroll Support Manager, you will lead a team of payroll operations specialists, resolve complex historical payroll issues, and set the operating rhythm that drives performance and consistency across the function.

You will partner with a senior SME to translate technical knowledge into scalable processes, coach the team, and own escalation management while shaping strategy and staffing.

Qualifications

• Startup or high-growth company background.
• 4–6+ years in operations, technical support, support operations, client service, or a similarly execution-heavy environment.
• Meaningful people management experience. You've directly managed a team, coached performance, and held clear standards for both outcomes and how the work gets done.
• Strong operational judgment. You can look at competing priorities, limited capacity, SLAs, customer impact, and risk and make a clear call on what should happen next.
• A track record of formal people management. You've hired, manage team growth, and understand how to organize people around team metrics.
• Strong communication skills. You can translate between team-level detail and leadership-level framing, and you know which audience needs which version.
• A genuine learner. You'll be getting fluent in a niche domain on the job, and you find that interesting rather than uncomfortable.
• A bias toward building durable systems. When you see the same problem twice, your instinct is to improve the process rather than simply solve it again.

Responsibilities

• Own the team's day-to-day operating rhythm, priorities, queue health, resource allocation, standups, escalation paths, and SLA performance.
• Manage and develop a team of experienced payroll operations specialists through regular coaching, feedback, performance management, and career development.
• Create visibility into team performance and surface risks, bottlenecks, and emerging trends before they become larger problems.
• Partner with the team's senior SME to turn technical expertise into repeatable processes, documentation, and broader team capability.
• Own complex operational escalations and coordinate the right technical or cross-functional partners when deeper expertise is required.
• Partner closely with leaders across Support, Filing, Tax Operations, Product, and R&D on issues that cross functional boundaries.
• Serve as a thought partner to the head of the department on team strategy, staffing, performance, and operational decisions.

Skills

Startup background

Operations background

People management

Operational judgment

Formal people management

Communication skills

Niche domain learner

Durable systems bias

Job description

Check is building payroll infrastructure to empower businesses to pay people accurately and compliantly. As Payroll Support Manager, you will lead a team of payroll operations specialists, resolve complex historical payroll issues, and set the operating rhythm that drives performance and consistency across the function.

You will partner with a senior SME to translate technical knowledge into scalable processes, coach the team, and own escalation management while shaping strategy and staffing.