Senior Benefits and Leave Administrator

Benefits Administration

• Own overall administration, accuracy, and compliance across all benefit offerings, providing employee-facing benefits support to employees while serving as the subject matter expert to the broader HR team
• Own the annual open enrollment process end to end across both states, including system configuration, communications, election audits, and post-enrollment reconciliation.
• Own carrier and broker vendor management, including escalations and discrepancy resolution, serving as the day-to-day point of contact for brokers and benefit vendors.
• Oversee the accuracy of enrollments, qualifying life events, terminations, and COBRA administration processed locally, and provide support for broader HR team.
• Serve as the primary administrator of benefit technology platforms, including data management, reporting, and vendor coordination with brokers and carriers.

Leave of Absence Administration

• Own day-to-day administration of leave of absence programs in Oregon from initial request through return to work, delivering compliant, empathetic service to employees navigating a leave.
• Own day-to-day administration of ADA accommodation requests in Oregon, from initial request through resolution.
• Serve as the subject matter expert and support resource for leave of absence, ADA, and FEHA accommodation requests in California, providing guidance and support to the CA HR team.
• Provide support and best-practice guidance to the CA HR team on complex or higher-risk leave and accommodation cases as needed.
• Maintain consistent leave and accommodation tracking, documentation, and correspondence templates across both states to support a unified compliance standard.
• Coordinate with carriers, payroll, and managers to ensure timely and accurate leave processing. 

Platform Administration

• Serve as the primary administrator of the benefits and leave administration platforms, maintaining accurate data, ensuring records reflect real-time status changes, and working across systems to ensure data flows accurately with no gaps, including reporting and vendor coordination with brokers and carriers.
• Reconcile monthly carrier billing and invoices against enrollment records, identifying and resolving discrepancies before payment.
• Perform regular audits comparing benefits and leave platform data against carrier and payroll records to catch and correct discrepancies before they surface downstream.
• Partner with Payroll to reconcile benefit deductions and leave-related payroll transactions, including intermittent leave and disability offsets, and to resolve variances.
• Maintain a documented audit trail for each reconciliation cycle, escalating unresolved issues to the HR Director.

Workers' Compensation Support

• Partner with HR team to provide support for workers' compensation claims from initial injury report through claim resolution.
• Reconcile workers' compensation claim data against leave and payroll records to ensure consistent, accurate treatment of overlapping leave and injury situations.
• Coordinate with the workers' compensation carrier as needed to ensure timely reporting, accurate claim documentation, and appropriate follow-up.
• Track claim status, restrictions, and return-to-work timelines, and coordinate light-duty or modified-duty arrangements with managers.

Process Improvement

Build and maintain standard operating procedures for benefits, leave, and workers' compensation processes, and keep documentation current as laws, vendors, or systems change.
Identify opportunities to streamline reconciliation, leave tracking, and claims workflows, and lead implementation of process improvements.
Provide cross-functional support to the broader HR team across all HR disciplines, including onboarding, employee relations, compliance, and HRIS, as workload and priorities require.
Train HR team members and people managers on benefits, leave, and workers' compensation procedures and system use.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of progressive experience in benefits and leave of absence administration, including at least 2 years supporting multi-state operations.
• Strong knowledge of FMLA, ADA, USERRA, COBRA, ACA, workers' compensation, and Oregon leave laws.
• Bachelor's degree in Human Resources, Business, or related field preferred; PHR, SHRM-CP, or CEBS certification a plus.  
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a natural inclination toward puzzling through discrepancies and getting to root cause rather than just resolving the symptom.
• Advanced Excel skills (pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, formulas for large-scale reconciliation) required.
• Highly organized, with the ability to manage multiple concurrent cases, deadlines, and reconciliation cycles without dropping details.
• Demonstrated experience reconciling carrier billing and HRIS data with a high degree of accuracy.
• Hands-on experience administering an HRIS and benefits administration portal.
• Strong attention to detail and comfort working independently as the sole owner of a high-volume, compliance-sensitive function.
• Ability to partner cross-functionally with HR, Payroll, brokers, and carriers to resolve discrepancies, and to support the HR team across a broad range of HR disciplines.