Workday Payroll, Time Tracking & Absence Lead

Location: Hybrid in the San Francisco or San Jose office four days per week; Tuesday is the designated work-from-home day.

Salary: $278,000–$325,000 annual base salary.

Company

Lambda builds AI cloud infrastructure for AI researchers, enterprises, and hyperscalers, with a mission to make compute widely accessible.

What you will do

• Lead the Workday implementation for Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence, including design sessions, configuration, testing, cutover, parallel testing, and hypercare.
• Configure and operate US and Canadian payroll, including pay groups, earnings, deductions, taxes, garnishments, accounting, and year-end processing.
• Design integrations with international payroll providers and manage payroll inputs, results, general-ledger postings, and reconciliations.
• Build time-tracking and absence rules for hourly, non-exempt, US, and international populations, including overtime, breaks, PTO, statutory leave, accruals, and carryover.
• Own payroll-related integrations with benefits carriers, 401(k), tax filing, equity compensation, and NetSuite.
• Partner with Payroll Operations, Accounting, People, and Engineering on audits, controls, root-cause analysis, releases, documentation, training, reports, and dashboards.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in HRIS or payroll systems, including 6+ years configuring Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence.
• Experience leading at least one Workday Payroll implementation through go-live.
• Deep knowledge of payroll business processes, Workday calculation logic, calculated fields, reports, tax configuration, retro processing, and payroll accounting.
• Experience with international payroll integrations and multi-country provider reconciliation.
• Strong knowledge of US payroll, including multi-state taxation, FLSA, California wage and hour rules, garnishments, equity compensation, RSU withholding, and year-end processing.
• Experience operating in SOX or audit-facing environments, with strong testing, documentation, reconciliation, and segregation-of-duties practices.

Nice to have

• Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, Absence, Integrations, or Workday Pro certifications.
• Experience with Workday HCM, Benefits, Compensation, Rippling migrations, or international payroll providers such as ADP Celergo, CloudPay, Papaya Global, or Deel.
• Experience with NetSuite, Okta, Lumos, Workato, BigQuery, IPO readiness, or payroll control design.
• Experience using AI tools for testing, documentation, or reconciliation.

Culture & Benefits

• Work within a fast-growing pre-IPO AI infrastructure company founded in 2012.
• Generous cash and equity compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• 401(k) plan with a 2% company match for US employees.
• Flexible paid time off, with wellness and commuter stipends available for select roles.