The Role
Lead and manage German payroll delivery and implementations, oversee end-to-end payroll cycles, coach and develop local teams, ensure compliance with German payroll legislation, drive process improvements and customer service, and partner with HR, Finance, Product and Customer Success to scale operations.
Summary Generated by Built In
The Payroll Operations Manager is responsible for the day‑to‑day leadership and operational management of payroll delivery and payroll implementations for our German entity. This role leads and develops the local payroll teams, ensuring the consistent delivery of accurate, compliant, and high‑quality payroll services, while providing an exceptional customer experience.
You will oversee end‑to‑end payroll operations, including onboarding new payroll clients, managing live payroll cycles, and supporting process transitions and improvements. A key part of the role is coaching, mentoring and supervising payroll professionals, fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous development within the team.
The Payroll Operations Manager acts as a trusted operational partner for customers, ensuring service levels are met or exceeded and that payroll delivery is seamless, reliable and responsive to client needs. You will proactively identify opportunities to enhance service quality, improve efficiency and streamline workflows, reducing turnaround times and operational friction while maintaining full compliance with German payroll legislation.
Working closely with internal stakeholders across HR, Customer Success, Finance and Product, you will drive continuous improvement initiatives that enable the payroll teams to move beyond transactional delivery and provide value‑adding support to customer accounts. This includes optimising processes, improving documentation, leveraging technology effectively, and supporting scalable growth within the German payroll function.
This role plays a critical part in shaping payroll operations in Germany and requires a leader who combines strong people management, deep payroll expertise and a customer‑centric mindset.
On a typical day, you’ll be…
- Manage the activity of the payroll teams, coordinating the department workflow and distributing work to ensure the delivery of a high quality, responsive and efficient service
- Manage performance of the German team, including managing headcount allocations, individual performance and career development.
- Act as the escalation point for team members and customers on complex payroll queries or customer issues as they arise
- Support the implementation of new customers, ensuring that they are onboarded as per the contract scope, timelines and contract requirements
- Take a lead role in supporting relationships with customers, ensuring that service delivery milestones and measures are being met consistently and that any issues are mitigated or escalated quickly
- Support internal stakeholders with projects, initiatives and process improvements
- Support the training and development of the payroll teams, including coaching and mentoring and ensuring that workload reflects the skill set of the individuals in the team
- Review existing payroll processes alongside the Team Leads regularly to look for efficiency improvements and present business cases for change and improvements
- Ensure that non-routine and/or complex additional work requests from customers are reviewed, the work fully understood and scoped, risks identified and a plan and resources are in place before commencing the work
To be truly effective you will…
- Excellent Operation Management skills, with a strong track record of managing large teams in complex bureau environments.
- Excellent technically, with a track record in delivery of payroll and very high level of technical knowledge of German payroll legislation
- Customer-focused with the ability to establish and strengthen relationships with customers and internal stakeholders
- Excellent at paying attention to detail, with a systematic and logical thinking style
- Adept at planning and managing numerous processes, people and projects simultaneously.
- Compelling in your interpersonal style; positive, authentic and likeable
- Good with people, but without sentimentality; clearly a member of the management team
- Courageous and clear in your communication style
- Motivated to contribute to P&L success, with strong and clear commercial drive and judgement
- Instinctively collaborative; a team player as well as team leader
- Ambitious for the success and growth of the business as well as professional success
- Very high integrity, a role model of doing the right thing
- Responsive and responsible, setting a high-performance bar for yourself and others
- Highly skilled as a coach and advisor
About
Our Story From our entrepreneurial origins as a founder led start up, to a high performing global player working with some of the world's most recognisable brands, activpayroll has both a fantastic history and masses of future potential. Our story began in 2001, when our founder saw a gap in the market to support the oil and gas industry. Today, we are a leading global professional service organisation, providing integrated global and domestic payroll solutions, expatriate taxation services, global HR services and online HR people management tools to over 1,200 companies in more than 150 countries worldwide. We’ve Got YouHiring people is more than an investment of time and money – it’s an investment of trust. You trust us to help you realise your fullest potential, work with brilliant people and recognise your achievements. In return, we trust your abilities, we trust your instincts and are fully behind you to deliver the great work you are capable of - empowering you to make the tough calls and valuing your opinions, ideas and abilities.
Skills Required
- Proven experience managing large payroll teams in a bureau or complex payroll environment
- Deep, technical knowledge of German payroll legislation and compliance
- Track record delivering payroll services and leading payroll implementations/onboarding
- Strong people management skills including coaching, mentoring and performance management
- Experience driving process improvements, documentation and operational efficiency
- Customer-focused with experience managing client relationships and escalations
- Commercial acumen and P&L awareness; ability to balance quality with cost and efficiency
- Excellent attention to detail, organisation and ability to manage multiple processes/projects simultaneously
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The Company
What We Do
Created to let your business work seamlessly in multiple countries by giving you complete clarity and confidence, activpayroll is global payroll, international payments, global mobility and HR in one. Pay your people compliantly, on time, every time, worldwide. Take control with accessible tech. Team up with global tax specialists to stay one step ahead of legislation and compliance. Strengthen your workforce with our strategic HR specialists, and work with a partner that gets your vision of global clarity. Wherever in the world your business takes you, we’ve got you.
