Incentive Compensation Systems Manager | Canada | Remote

Grafana Labs

17h•CA$145,000 - CA$175,000•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking an Incentive Compensation Systems Manager to join their Incentive Compensation (IC) team. This role focuses on driving the systemization, automation, and continuous improvement of commission operations. It's a high-impact, individual contributor position with end-to-end ownership, reporting to the Senior Manager, Incentive Compensation. The successful candidate will operate in an unstructured, fast-paced, remote-first environment, identifying process gaps, replacing manual workarounds with scalable systems, and enhancing the predictability, accuracy, and speed of commission, quota, and comp plan administration. The role offers deep exposure to the end-to-end flow of incentive compensation data from CRM (e.g., SFDC) and People systems (e.g., Workday) through calculation engines (e.g., Xactly) to payout and reporting (e.g., BigQuery). This individual will be the go-to person for slow, fragile, or spreadsheet-dependent processes, partnering with IC Operations, Finance & Strategy, People Ops, and RevOps to identify friction points and build tooling and workflows to eliminate them. The role requires a blend of technical depth for automation and process discipline for prioritizing problems.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in incentive compensation, sales operations, revenue operations, or a related systems/process improvement role.
Experience in a fast-paced technology or SaaS business is highly preferred.
Demonstrated track record of finding manual, broken, or inefficient processes and systematizing them, not just documenting problems but building the solution.
Hands-on SQL experience and comfort querying and reconciling data across systems to diagnose process gaps and validate automated outputs.
Hands-on experience building automated workflows using tools such as scripting, workflow/RPA platforms, or ICM systems (e.g., Xactly, CaptivateIQ, Varicent, SPIFF platforms).
Comfort standing up lightweight tools or integrations when off-the-shelf options fall short.
Familiarity with the core systems that touch incentive compensation: CRM (e.g., Salesforce), HRIS, data warehouses (e.g., BigQuery), and comp management platforms (e.g., Xactly) understanding how data moves between them.
Strong communication skills, with the ability to sit with a team, understand how they actually work day-to-day, and translate that into clear systems requirements and process changes.
Understanding of core comp mechanics (quotas, accelerators, SPIFFs, payout timing) sufficient to spot where a process breaks down or introduces risk.

Nice To Haves

Experience working in a high-growth SaaS, cloud, or open-source company, particularly within a public company or an environment undergoing IPO readiness.
Proven success working within globally distributed, remote-first organizations across multiple time zones.
Experience documenting datasets and workflows for Model Context Protocol (MCP) server ingestion, or building AI skills/agents to automate incentive compensation data discovery, exception detection, or reporting.

Responsibilities

Embed with the IC team to map current-state workflows across plan administration, calculation, approvals, and payout.
Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone steps and prioritize them based on risk, time cost, and business impact.
Design and build automated workflows, integrations, and tooling that replace manual processes from data pulls and reconciliations to approval routing and exception handling.
Reduce reliance on ad-hoc spreadsheets and one-off scripts in favor of durable, repeatable systems.
Serve as a hands-on owner of Xactly instances (e.g., Incent and Connect), configuring calculation rules, plan logic, and workflows, and continuously tuning the platform.
Identify where AI tools and LLM-driven agents can automate manual, repetitive Incentive Compensation work such as exception detection, data reconciliation, plan document review, or answering common comp questions and build the workflows/integrations to put them into production.
Partner with IC, Finance & Strategy, People Ops, Revenue Operations, and IT/Data teams to ensure incentive compensation systems are properly integrated, with clean, reliable data flowing between them.
Establish clear documentation, standard operating procedures, and controls for newly systematized processes, so they're auditable, maintainable, and don't regress back into manual work over time.
Set up a repeatable process for the IC team to keep identifying and retiring manual work, as an ongoing discipline of finding the next bottleneck and fixing it.
Act as the go-to resource translating IC process needs into system requirements, and translating system/data constraints back into practical process recommendations the team can act on.
Support urgent, ad-hoc requests during payout cycles while keeping an eye on the long-term goal by systemizing the fixes to build yourself out of the fire-fighting role.