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About us
The Professional Services (PS) Hub brings together key customer-facing and transactional services across HR, Finance, Estates, and IT. The PS Hub is committed to delivering high-quality, efficient, and responsive services, with a strong emphasis on customer experience, effective controls, and continuous improvement.
Reporting to the Director of Financial Services, the Head of Payroll is accountable for the compliance, completeness, accuracy, and timely delivery of UCL's payroll service.
UCL operates a large and complex monthly payroll for more than 19,000 employees, encompassing a wide range of contract types, payment bases, pay elements, deductions, and working arrangements.
About the role
This is a significant leadership role with responsibility for the accurate, timely, and compliant delivery of UCL’s monthly payroll for more than 19,000 employees. Our payroll is both large and complex, covering a wide range of contract types, payment arrangements, pay elements, allowances, deductions, multiple employments, and variable payments.
Reporting to the Director of Financial Services, you will have overall accountability for payroll delivery, statutory compliance, payroll controls, reconciliations, and the quality of service provided to employees and managers across UCL.
- You will lead and develop a team of payroll professionals, creating clear standards, strong accountability, and a culture of continuous improvement.
- You will oversee the full payroll cycle, including gross-to-net validation and sign-off, statutory reporting and payments, pension processing, general ledger interfaces, year-end activity, and exceptional payments. A key priority for the role will be strengthening UCL’s payroll control environment.
- You will ensure that robust approval processes, reconciliations, segregation of duties, exception reporting, and audit trails are embedded throughout the service.
- You will work closely with colleagues across HR, Finance, Internal Audit, and our wider Professional Services Hub to identify risks, address control weaknesses, and implement sustainable improvements.
- You will also lead improvements to the customer experience, using service data, feedback, and performance measures to ensure the payroll service is responsive, accurate, and easy to engage with.
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About you
You will be an accomplished payroll leader with substantial experience of managing and administering a large and complex payroll of more than 10,000 employees.
Your experience may have been gained within an in-house payroll function or while delivering payroll services on behalf of clients through a payroll provider.
You will hold a recognised professional payroll qualification, such as a CIPP qualification at Level 5 or above, or an equivalent professional qualification.
You will bring strong technical knowledge of UK payroll legislation, statutory reporting, tax, National Insurance, pensions, and payroll year-end requirements.
You will also have experience of managing complex payroll arrangements involving different contract types, payment bases, pay elements, deductions, allowances, multiple employments, and significant volumes of monthly change.
You will be able to demonstrate:
- Successful leadership of a large payroll service and specialist payroll team.
- Strong experience of payroll governance, controls, reconciliations, exception reporting, and formal payroll sign-off.
- A track record of identifying and resolving payroll risks and control weaknesses.
- Experience of implementing audit recommendations and improving payroll procedures.
- Strong systems knowledge, including payroll interfaces, data quality, testing, and controlled system change.
- The ability to manage competing priorities and deliver accurately against immovable deadlines.
- A strong customer focus and commitment to delivering a responsive, high-quality service.
- The confidence to work effectively with senior stakeholders, auditors, statutory bodies, and service partners.
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You will be a calm, credible, and decisive leader who combines technical payroll expertise with strong judgment, a clear control mindset, and a commitment to improving both service quality and employee experience.
What we offer
At UCL, you will have the opportunity to lead one of the largest and most complex payroll services in the higher education sector and play a central role in strengthening payroll operations, controls, and customer experience.
You will join a collaborative Professional Services environment and work with colleagues across Finance, HR, and the wider institution to deliver a payroll service that supports UCL’s people and academic mission.
As well as the exciting opportunities this role presents, we also offer some great benefits, some of which are below:
- 41 Days holiday (including 27 days annual leave, 8 bank holidays, and 6 closure days)
- Defined benefit career average revalued earnings pension scheme (CARE)
- Cycle to work scheme and season ticket loan
- On-site nursery
- On-site gym
- Enhanced maternity, paternity, and adoption pay
- Employee assistance programme
- Staff Support Service
- Discounted medical insurance
Our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
As London’s Global University, we know diversity fosters creativity and innovation, and we want our community to represent the diversity of the world’s talent. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where we all belong. We therefore particularly encourage applications from candidates who are likely to be underrepresented in UCL’s workforce. These include people from Black, Asian, and ethnic minority backgrounds; disabled people; LGBTQI+ people; and for our Grade 9 and 10 roles, women.
You can read more about our commitment to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/equality-diversity-inclusion/
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