Senior Payroll & Compliance Specialist

What the Role Is As our Senior Payroll & Compliance Specialist, you'll own the most tangible ways we look after our team: paying people correctly and staying compliant in a fast-changing regulatory environment. You'll do that for a distributed workforce of 600–1,000 employees across ~35 states, 300+ of them nonexempt/hourly. You'll report to our People Operations Manager and work most closely with People Ops, Accounting, and our payroll partner, Newfront — owning our U.S. compliance calendar end to end (45+ recurring obligations a year across about a dozen jurisdictions), with real room to redesign the steps that slow us down. If you've supported complex, multi-state payroll for a large nonexempt workforce, take pride in getting it right, and like being the steady hand behind the scenes, this role will energize you. Who You Are • You run multi-state U.S. payroll end to end in an enterprise HRIS (Paylocity or comparable) — inputs, timecard corrections, off-cycle and termination pay, garnishments, and final review before funding. • You've owned a compliance calendar covering EEO-1, OSHA, nondiscrimination testing, and state reporting — plus background checks, I-9 review, required trainings, and policy creation and revision. You surface deadlines before they're urgent. • Direct experience with California or New York employment law is a strong plus. These are our two most demanding states — same-day final pay, pay data reporting, and local rules that change often. It's learnable, but if you've run compliance in either, you'll ramp much faster. • You turn legal redlines into usable policy. You've worked with Legal and outside counsel on handbook language and translated it into something employees will actually follow. • You improve a process, then prove it. You test against known-good output, build in the checks that show it's still running clean, and leave a written SOP behind. You reach for AI naturally to move faster — at Babylist, every team uses it daily. • You can explain a paycheck to the person who earned it , and the numbers to the people who sign off on them. • You hold a deadline. You plan backward from the pay date and the filing date, stay responsive during processing windows, and raise a flag early when a date is at risk. • You have 5–8 years in payroll and compliance, including 3+ years running multi-state U.S. payroll. CPP, FPC, SHRM-CP, SHRM-SCP, PHR, or SPHR aren't required, but any would cement your expertise. How You Will Make An Impact • You'll run two payroll cycles end to end — weekly for our fulfillment center and hourly showroom teams, bi-weekly for corporate and salaried showroom — handling every change for a large hourly population: new hires, terminations, clawbacks, corrections, direct deposit updates, and ad-hoc termination pay. • You'll audit every pre-process register before funding and work discrepancies with Newfront until they're resolved. • You'll be the person employees reach when a paycheck doesn't make sense — questions answered or routed within one business day. • You'll own the U.S. compliance calendar through annual filings — EEO-1, CA Pay Data, and OSHA 300 across corporate, both showrooms, and the fulfillment center — and translate legislative change across ~35 states into the handful of actions that actually apply, then brief the People team. • You'll run screenings that hold up under review: background check review and escalation, plus quarterly health exclusion checks. • You'll take point on the annual "Compliance Refresh" each February, chasing it to 100% completion across every eligible employee and contractor, and partner with Legal and outside counsel on handbook and policy review every two years. • You'll design the internal controls across payroll and compliance and