Senior Payroll Operations Specialist

Who You Are

As a Senior Payroll Operations Specialist - Canada on the International team, you will be responsible for ensuring the accuracy, timeliness, and compliance of payroll for employees across Canada. 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 remittances and reporting—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 Canadian federal and provincial regulations, including Québec’s unique requirements. 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 Canadian payroll execution.

Your Success ProfileWhat You Will Work On

• Execute day-to-day operations for Justworks' Canadian payroll system, including processing and reviewing customer payroll, handling corrections, and ensuring compliance with federal and provincial regulations.
• Monitor payroll payments, triage, and resolve incoming payroll-related issues efficiently.
• Perform payroll reconciliation, ensuring accuracy in income withholding, tax remittances, and reporting while identifying and resolving discrepancies.
• Maintain a comprehensive understanding of Canadian payroll tax laws, staying up to date on legislative changes across provinces, including Québec, and applying this knowledge to support complex payroll decisions.
• Implement and refine payroll workflows to support evolving Canadian payroll 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 Canadian context.
• Process income withholding orders, records of employment (ROEs), and assist with accrual calculations in accordance with Canadian payroll regulations.
• Research payroll topics related to product development and regulatory changes that impact payroll processing in Canada.
• Conduct end-of-month reconciliation processes in collaboration with the Accounting team to ensure payroll accuracy.
• Partner with the Audit team to continuously improve payroll controls and compliance measures.
• Review tax documents and processes to ensure full compliance with end-of-year reporting requirements in Canada.
• Perform other related duties as assigned to support smooth and compliant payroll operations across Canada.

How You Will Do Your Work

As a Senior Payroll Operations Specialist - Canada, 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 – You work collaboratively toward a higher purpose, actively listening and supporting teammates.
• Openness – You share information, consider diverse perspectives, and welcome feedback.
• Grit – You commit and persevere through challenges with a positive attitude.
• Integrity – You follow through on commitments, act with honesty, and lead by example.
• Simplicity – You focus on making complex things as simple as possible.

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 multiple provinces in Canada. This includes payroll calculations, execution, tax reconciliation, and reporting, ensuring accuracy and compliance at every stage.
• National Payroll Institute (Canada) PCP designation is a plus.
• Demonstrable working knowledge of annual wage bases, employee and employer taxes, and accrual rules
• 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

#LI-Hybrid #LI-KK1