Senior Workday Payroll Architect

Join Lambda, a fast-growing pre-IPO company, as a Senior Workday Payroll Architect. In this hands-on configuration role, you will lead the implementation of Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence, ensuring compliance and accuracy across multiple jurisdictions. You will partner with various departments, including Finance, People, and Payroll Operations, and be the go-to expert for any payroll-related inquiries. This position requires a deep understanding of Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence, as well as experience in HRIS or payroll systems.

• Serve as the functional lead for Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence in our Workday implementation, driving design sessions, owning configuration decisions, and signing off on readiness for cutover.
• Configure and maintain Workday Payroll for US & Canada employees, including pay groups, earnings and deductions, tax setup, garnishments, and period-end processing.
• Design and operate the flow between Workday and our international payroll providers, ensuring accurate payroll input files, results return, GL posting, and reconciliation.

• Note: This position requires presence in our San Francisco or San Jose office location 4 days per week; Lambda's designated work from home day is currently Tuesday
• Payroll Knowledge: Know US payroll fundamentals cold: multi-state taxation, FLSA, wage and hour rules (especially California), garnishments, imputed income, equity compensation and RSU withholding, and year-end
• Cross-functional Partnership: Comfortable translating between Payroll, People, Accounting, and Engineering. You can explain a retro calculation to a controller and a tax setup to a recruiter
• Workday Depth: Fluent in payroll business processes, the calculation engine (calculated fields, pay component logic, custom reports), tax configuration, retro processing, and payroll accounting. Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, or Absence certification (or equivalent partner experience) strongly preferred
• Global Payroll: Have run or integrated international payroll through Workday, whether via Global Payroll Connect partners or custom integrations, and understand the data, timing, and reconciliation challenges that come with multiple countries and providers
• Compliance & Controls: Have operated in a SOX or audit-facing environment and understand why segregation of duties, approvals, and evidence matter in payroll
• Experience: 10+ years in HRIS or payroll systems, with at least 6+ years hands-on configuring Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence. You have taken at least one Workday Payroll implementation live as the functional lead, ideally with Time Tracking and Absence in the same phase
• Adaptability: Comfortable with ambiguity and velocity at a pre-IPO company. Requirements change, headcount grows fast, new countries open, and you re-plan without drama
• Operating Rigor: You test thoroughly, document what you build, and never move a payroll change into production without a parallel run or reconciliation behind it
• Attitude: An enthusiastic, go-for-it attitude. When something looks off in a payroll result, you can't leave it alone until you find the root cause
• Experience with configurations in Workday’s HCM, Benefit and compensation
• Experience migrating from Rippling or another all-in-one HR/payroll platform to Workday
• Workday Pro certifications in Payroll, Time Tracking, Absence, or Integrations
• Experience with international payroll providers (for example ADP Celergo, CloudPay, Papaya Global, Deel) and employer-of-record arrangements
• Familiarity with the rest of our stack: NetSuite, Okta, Lumos, Workato, BigQuery
• IPO readiness experience, including payroll control design and equity compensation processing
• Experience using AI tooling to accelerate testing, documentation, or reconciliation