Senior Payroll Operations & Shared Services Leader

Harvard Central Administration (CADM) Talent Acquisition; Cambridge (MA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Parental leave

Health insurance

Retirement plans

Tuition assistance

Job summary

Harvard Central Administration (CADM) Talent Acquisition is seeking an Associate Director, Payroll Operations and Shared Services to lead central payroll processing, compliance, and service delivery across Harvard’s schools and units. You will partner with HR, finance, and IT to design controls and scalable processes.

You will oversee payroll teams, implement the Workforce Services Hub, manage risk, and drive standardized metrics and training.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in payroll operations, payroll compliance, or shared services with progressively responsible roles.
• At least 5 years managing payroll, finance, HR operations, or shared services teams in a complex organization.
• Supervisory experience with service delivery expectations, controls, escalations, and process improvement.

Responsibilities

• Provides leadership, coaching, and payroll subject matter expertise to payroll and shared services stakeholders.
• Establishes payroll procedures, controls, documentation standards, and compliance monitoring practices.
• Partners with HR, HUIT, Labor Relations, school and unit finance teams, Tax Compliance, Financial Policy, OGC, Risk Management, and Internal Audit to resolve payroll issues and implement changes.
• Improves payroll service delivery through workflow design, service metrics, root-cause analysis, automation, workload balancing, and standardization.
• Supports shared services design, implementation, change management, stakeholder communication, training, transition planning, and stabilization.
• Manages payroll-related risk by identifying control gaps, monitoring recurring issues, coordinating remediation, and supporting escalation protocols.
• Partners with HUIT and functional stakeholders on payroll systems, reporting, data integrity, access controls, integrations, and testing.

Skills

Payroll operations

Compliance

Leadership

Stakeholder collaboration

Process improvement

Risk management

Tools

PeopleSoft

Oracle

Workday

SAP

Job description

Harvard Central Administration (CADM) Talent Acquisition is seeking an Associate Director, Payroll Operations and Shared Services to lead central payroll processing, compliance, and service delivery across Harvard’s schools and units. You will partner with HR, finance, and IT to design controls and scalable processes.

You will oversee payroll teams, implement the Workforce Services Hub, manage risk, and drive standardized metrics and training.