Payroll Team Leader
2 days ago
Epsom
💼 Payroll Team Leader 📍 Location: Epsom, Surrey 🏢 Office-based through probation, moving to hybrid after successful completion 📌 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 👤 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 ⭐ 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.