Payroll Specialist

Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them.
Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past.
We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here https://www.sona.ai/careers.
About the Role
We're hiring a Payroll Specialist to join Sona's payroll bureau, taking hands-on ownership of UK payroll processing for a portfolio of our customers.
Our bureau is growing fast. We're moving from around 15,000 payslips a month to roughly 22,000 by the start of Q4, driven by new customer go-lives in hospitality and care. That means the pace of the role is genuinely high, and we're hiring ahead of that curve rather than catching up after the fact.
Day to day, you'll manage a portfolio of standard and mid-complexity clients across multiple pay frequencies: statutory payments, pension auto-enrolment, HMRC filings and payroll journal reconciliation. You'll also handle client queries through our support desk, working to fast turnaround times. Your work is checked by a Senior Payroll Specialist before it reaches clients, as part of our standard quality process.
This isn't a conventional bureau role. Sona is a startup and the payroll team is still building its own processes and tools, so there's genuine room to shape how things work and to grow as the bureau scales. You'll be working on a product in a sector most software has ignored, and once you're through probation we support CIPP study through the apprenticeship levy.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end UK payroll processing for a portfolio of Sona customers across multiple pay frequencies, covering standard and mid-complexity clients
- Manage payroll queries through our support desk, giving clients fast, proactive updates and resolving within SLA
- Process statutory payments, court orders, standard holiday pay calculations, Alabaster reviews and NMW checks for your own portfolio
- Handle workplace pension auto-enrolment, contributions, reconciliations and submissions, flagging any miscalculated contributions for investigation
- Upload, reconcile and submit payments across BACS, Faster Payments and SEPA, and manage payroll journal uploads and reconciliations
- Manage HMRC filings (FPS, EPS) and year-end processing for your portfolio, escalating disputed or mis-allocated PAYE cases to your Senior or the Payroll Manager
- Build strong working relationships with clients, including attending client meetings when needed, and flag product bugs to Engineering as you spot them
- Spot and flag process gaps or improvements within your own portfolio, and support Payroll Assistants and Senior Payroll Specialists with day-to-day queries
Requirements
- 2+ years hands-on experience processing multiple UK payrolls independently
- Experience within a bureau or outsourced payroll environment is a bonus
- Good working knowledge of UK payroll and tax compliance, including tax calculations and filing and payment requirements
- Confident managing a busy queue of support tickets, with strong organisational skills and clear written and verbal communication
- Comfortable in Excel (VLOOKUPs, pivot tables, concatenation) and Google Suite
- Methodical and accurate under volume, and quick to flag issues rather than let them become problems
- Bonus: CIPP or equivalent qualification, exposure to Irish payroll (PAYE, PRSI, USC), or confidence using AI tools in your day-to-day work
Benefits
- Salary: £35,000 - £45,000
- Hybrid working - 2+ days/week in our London office (Soho)
- Share options
- 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
- Extra day of leave for every year of service
- Pension contributions matched up to 5%
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Enhanced parental leave & pay
- Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery)
- Annual all expenses paid team retreats
- The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
- Professional development budget
- Unlimited free books
Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.

Employment type
FullTime

Work arrangement
Yes