Senior Payroll & Compliance Specialist

The posting, as Babylist wrote it

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 does

[…]
r career advancement

• We believe technology and data can solve hard problems
• We're committed to career progression and performance-based advancement

Benefits

• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Retirement savings plan with company matching and flexible spending accounts
• Generous paid parental leave and PTO
• Winter Wonder Week: the whole company takes a paid week off at the end of the year, whether or not you celebrate anything, so everyone's out at once and comes back refreshed
• Remote work stipend to set up your office
• Perks for physical, mental, and emotional health, parenting, childcare, and financial planning

Important Notices

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Interview Integrity. AI is part of how we work at Babylist. We expect you to use it too. Your application and interviews should still reflect you and your own thinking. We'll tell you when AI is encouraged. Misrepresentation at any stage may result in removal from consideration for this and future roles.

How We Review Applications We use AI throughout our hiring process to help review, screen, and assess applications. These tools support our team's review; they do not replace it, and every hiring decision is made by a person.

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