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Payroll Team Leader
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💼 Payroll Team Leader
📍 Location: Epsom, Surrey
🏢 Work Model: Office-based through probation, moving to hybrid after successful completion
📌 Employment Type: Full-time
We are looking for an experienced Payroll Team Leader to lead the accurate, compliant and timely delivery of a UK in-house payroll service within a large engineering and infrastructure organisation. This role is ideal for someone who has built their career in calm, controlled payroll operations and is ready to bring that discipline into a structured, multinational environment.
You will sit at the intersection of hands-on payroll delivery and real team leadership, owning the day-to-day payroll operation, maintaining strong governance and controls, supporting legislative and benefit changes, and providing clear reporting to senior HR stakeholders.
🔎 The Role
As Payroll Team Leader, you will lead the end-to-end UK payroll cycle, ensuring employees are paid accurately and on time while supporting the payroll team with workload control, priorities, deadlines and escalations. You will also play a key role in payroll governance, National Minimum Wage compliance, benefits processing, reconciliations, reporting and continuous improvement.
✅ Key Responsibilities
- Lead the end-to-end delivery of the UK in-house payroll cycle
- Manage the payroll team’s daily workload, priorities and deadlines
- Provide guidance, coaching and escalation support to payroll colleagues
- Own payroll validation, reconciliations, exception checks, approvals and audit controls
- Ensure compliance with UK payroll legislation, HMRC requirements, PAYE, National Insurance, statutory payments and company policy
- Monitor National Minimum Wage compliance, especially around salary sacrifice and flexible benefit deductions
- Process and oversee the payroll treatment of flexible benefits
- Partner with Reward, Benefits, HR Operations, HR Business Partners, Finance, pensions and systems teams
- Produce payroll service reporting covering accuracy, timeliness, exceptions, service levels, incidents, risks and improvement actions
- Act as the escalation point for complex payroll queries
- Maintain strong process documentation, controls and audit trails
- Support year-end and statutory payroll activity
- Identify opportunities to improve payroll efficiency, controls and data quality
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👤 What we are looking for
- Proven hands-on experience delivering end-to-end UK payroll
- Experience in an in-house or similarly complex payroll environment
- Strong knowledge of UK payroll legislation, including PAYE, NI, statutory payments, RTI and National Minimum Wage principles
- Experience leading or managing payroll colleagues
- Strong workload control, coaching and escalation handling experience
- Experience with payroll-related benefits, salary sacrifice or flexible benefit schemes
- Confident stakeholder management and payroll performance reporting skills
- Strong attention to detail, numerical ability and deadline discipline
- Good Excel skills and confidence working across payroll systems, HRIS platforms and employee data
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⭐ Strong Differentiators
- CIPP qualification or recognised payroll training
- Governance, audit and controls experience, including SOX or similar compliance environments
- Experience across pensions payroll, including DB, DC and auto-enrolment
- Ability to translate payroll complexity into clear reporting for Finance, HR and senior leadership
- Experience with process improvement, payroll migrations or fixing fragile payroll operations
- Familiarity with Workday, Oracle, SAP, Dayforce, ADP, Zellis or similar systems
🎁 Why this role
- Stable, well-established organisation with a structured HR operating model
- Real ownership of a meaningful part of the payroll cycle
- Direct visibility to senior stakeholders
- Opportunity to bring calm, controlled leadership into a business that values governance and payroll accuracy
📩 For a confidential conversation, please get in touch to discuss the opportunity in more detail.
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