Senior Product Manager, Payroll Platform

About the role

Please Note: This is a remote position available in the state listed on this job. Additionally, employment with BambooHR is contingent on passing both a background and credit check.

AI at BambooHR

At BambooHR, we're all about setting people free to do great work, and we believe AI is a powerful partner in that mission. We're leaning into intelligent tools to streamline our workflows, giving us more time for high-impact innovation. We look for curious, forward-thinking people who are ready to explore how AI can elevate their work and help us reimagine the future of HR.

Essential Job Duties

• We're looking for a Sr. Product Manager to own the systems payroll runs on: data sync, calculation, payment operations tools, and the data model underneath them.
• You'll make sure payroll builds on BambooHR's shared platform services: canonical data entities, a permission service, an event bus, and an observability stack.
• You hold payroll to the contracts those services publish.

On a typical day you might sequence a migration step so no client's payday is ever the test case, agree on the direction of the payroll data model with payroll engineering leadership, or work out what it costs to keep an old system alive one more quarter. A new platform is still maturing while the old system carries production load.

You will

• Own payroll platform modernization: decide what moves from old operational tools to their replacement, and when, and sequence each step so payroll is never at risk.
• Price the cost of keeping old systems running, including support escalations, manual fixes, and the risk of a missed pay date.
• Own the product half of the payroll data-model redesign, weighing event-driven streaming against the current full-resync approach, jointly with payroll engineering leadership. Validate it against the company's canonical entity models using real client examples.
• Own access and audit discipline on payroll systems: permission granularity, audit posture, least-privilege carve-outs, deny-by-default rollouts, and feature-flag discipline. Coordinate with the security organization and build on the platform's existing ways of recording who did what.
• Own compliance and retention for payroll: data retention positions, regulatory changes that affect payroll systems, and the audit interface with governance, risk, and compliance, documented as decisions rather than tribal knowledge.
• Test long-held assumptions about what payroll systems can and cannot do, publish the real limits and latency curves, and write them up so leadership can act on them.
• Run a payroll roadmap review cadence: a quarterly plan with dates, a weekly written status for leadership, and coordination with payroll services on operational readiness.

Success in the First 180 Days

• Deliver a dated plan for retiring the old systems with the cost of keeping each one priced, and retire at least one without a payroll incident.
• Land the payroll data-model direction as a written decision agreed with engineering.
• Make payroll's permission and audit setup the reference example other internal tools copy.
• Complete canonical-model validation for each payroll domain so payroll builds against platform contracts by default.

What You Need to Get the Job Done

• You feel aligned with the BambooHR values.
• 5+ years of product management experience. HCM, payroll, or payroll-adjacent platform experience is strongly preferred.
• You have coordinated with downstream consumers at scale: dozens of teams reading one system's contracts.
• Rollout discipline is a reflex for you: parallel runs, instant rollback, user acceptance testing, and release trains.
• You're technical enough to discuss database schemas, APIs, and migration mechanics with engineers as a peer.
• You're comfortable in regulated, sensitive-data domains and treat compliance counterparts as partners.
• You hold evidence standards in a domain full of inherited assumptions: you measure before you assert, and you write decisions down.
• You flag risks before deadlines.

What Will Make Us REALLY Love You

• Experience stewarding a legacy enterprise platform through a successor migration.
• Payments, money-movement, or banking-file operational experience.
• Familiarity with event-driven data architectures that replace batch and resync patterns.
• A developer background.

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