Sr. Manager, Compensation

What You'll Do

The Sr. Manager, Compensation is the hands-on execution engine of Viant's Compensation function. This role owns compensation cycles, benchmarking, internal equity analysis, census accuracy, and compensation data integrity across all systems. They partner closely with the Sr. Director of Compensation, Talent Acquisition, HR Operations, and Finance to ensure clean data, disciplined pay practices, and reliable headcount and compensation forecasting.

This role delivers the analytical horsepower and operational precision behind Viant's compensation strategy.

The Day-to-day

• Run annual merit, bonus, and equity cycles end-to-end, including data prep, audits, templates, modeling, and manager support.
• Build, maintain, and reconcile compensation files used for comp cycles and executive reviews.
• Conduct market pricing, maintain job architecture and salary bands, evaluate new job requests, and ensure consistent leveling and pricing across functions and locations.
• Own day-to-day accuracy of the compensation census-job codes, bands, geography, cost centers-and partner with HRIS on audits, validations, and corrections.
• Maintain rolling headcount and compensation forecasts; model the impact of hires, exits, promotions, and adjustments to support annual and ongoing planning.
• Provide cost analyses, scenario modeling, and recommendations during reforecast and planning cycles, streamlining and automating reporting where possible.
• Partner with Talent Acquisition to review offers, ensure internal equity, validate band placement, and support offer guidelines and negotiation guardrails.
• Produce compensation dashboards and analytics (compa-ratios, distribution, equity, compression, geographic differentials, risk areas) and provide ad hoc insights to HR, TA, and Finance.
• Ensure compliance with pay transparency laws, internal equity standards, SOX requirements, and maintain audit-ready documentation for all compensation decisions.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with HR Ops and TA on job changes, data accuracy, workflows, system builds, and compensation inputs for budgeting and forecasting.

Great to Have

• 4 to 7+ years experience in Compensation, Total Rewards, or Finance/FP&A with compensation exposure.
• Strong comp analysis, modeling, benchmarking, and data accuracy skills.
• Solid understanding of compensation best practices, job leveling, pay equity, and salary structures.
• Expert in Excel and comfortable manipulating large datasets.
• Experience partnering with HRIS teams; ADP, Charthop and Greenhouse familiarity a plus.
• Ability to manage deadlines, maintain accuracy, and operate with discretion.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain comp concepts to managers and leaders.