Workday HCM Manager

Thought Machine's mission is bold – to properly and permanently rid the world's banks of legacy technology. To achieve this, we have developed the foundations of modern banking through core and payments technology which run natively in the cloud. What we are attempting is hard and means we need great people working together to build great technology. We have grown rapidly in the past few years – growing our team to more than 550 individuals across offices in London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and our newly established Engineering Hub in Lisbon. We have raised more than £500m in funding and our investors include Molten Ventures, Eurazeo, Intesa Sanpaolo, Temasek, Nyca Partners, JPMorgan Chase Strategic Investments, Standard Chartered Ventures, and more. We have created a culture that enables our team to produce the best work in the industry while ensuring we have fun along the way. We're regularly cited as having a fantastic workplace culture and have been recognised by Sifted magazine as having one of the highest Glassdoor ratings for a UK fintech company and the industry's most generous employee share package. Named one of the world's most innovative fintechs by Global Finance Magazine, we were also recognised by the Financial Times as one of Europe's fastest-growing companies for two consecutive years—and a UK Best Employer for 2026. Thought Machine is looking for a talented HCM systems manager and will report into the People Operations Director. The business uses Workday HCM and needs someone experienced in usage of the system to continue with process improvements, maintain the system and support the People function. We are on a journey to eliminate manual processes, and this role will play a critical part in ensuring we have reliable data, automated processes and fast, meaningful reporting. Duties • Full system administrator ownership, responsible for ongoing maintenance and development of Workday HR system, Ashby Recruitment ATS system, Ravio Benchmarking Tooling, shares management system and other people systems - working towards a fully integrated people systems landscape. • Drive improvement across all People Team systems - reviewing existing processes, introducing AI, automation, and accurate reporting. • Partner closely with People, Recruitment, Finance, and IT stakeholders to capture operational requirements, maintain a structured delivery backlog, and prioritise system enhancements that deliver measurable business impact and thoughtful system design. • Recommend the optimum way of maintaining systems considering accuracy, timely reporting, system security and segregation of duties. Drive best practices and standards, untangling any tech debt or ineffective processes. • Own the relationships with the appropriate 3rd party reps for all people system providers, integrators or external consultants. Manage the contracts and renewals and proactively engage with the product owners and commercial teams, keep ahead of changes, fixes, best practice, prices etc - cascading relevant information internally. • Actively engage and drive involvement across the business. Engaging key stakeholders (HR, Operations, IT and Security) to suggest and implement further improvements across the technical landscape. • Support the People team and the rest of the Enterprise with best practice, standard processes e.g. performance cycles, on/offboarding, pay reviews, reporting, etc. • Support training activities and ensure the business is kept up to speed on newly implemented processes, including the production of user guides and training. Requirements Essential • Proven Workday HCM knowledge and experience across Core HCM, compensation, expenses, security groups, integrations, business process framework (BPF) and advanced reporting (c