Leave & Benefits Specialist

E. & J. Gallo Winery•Modesto, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

You’ll play a critical role in supporting the Health & Wellbeing function by ensuring employees experience accurate, timely, and compliant leave, disability, and absence administration. In this role, you’ll blend analytical thinking with hands-on case management to support leaves of absence, disability wage replacement, workers’ compensation, and health benefits, all while protecting employee pay, access, and accruals. Your work will sit at the intersection of people, process, and systems. You’ll manage intake and coding of absences through automated integrations, vendor interfaces, and manual adjustments, while monitoring exception reports and resolving issues before they impact employees. Each day brings opportunities to research, analyze, and resolve complex timekeeping and leave scenarios, including escalations, historical corrections, and new requests. You’ll serve as a trusted resource to employees, managers, HR Business Partners, and Employee Relations by answering questions related to leave eligibility, pay coordination, and protected time under company policy, collective bargaining agreements, and California regulations. You’ll also collaborate closely with external vendors and internal partners to ensure service agreements, data accuracy, and compliance standards are consistently met. Beyond daily operations, you’ll contribute to continuous improvement by analyzing absence trends, building dashboards, supporting system testing, and participating in integrated disability and absence management initiatives. Your attention to detail, commitment to confidentiality, and ownership mindset will help strengthen processes that directly impact the employee experience.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree plus 2 years of experience in Human Resources to include leave or absence experience reflecting increasing levels of responsibility; OR High School diploma or State-issued equivalency certificate plus 6 years of Human Resources experience to include leave or absence experience reflecting increasing levels of responsibility.
Experience managing privileged and confidential information.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
High level of attention to detail.
Skilled in the use of MS Office Suite (Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) at an intermediate level.
Experience in payroll administration/practices.
Knowledge of California leave, disability, paid sick leave, and payroll laws and regulations.
Required to travel to company offices, sites, and/or meeting locations for onboarding, training, meetings, and events for development, department needs, and business delivery up to 5% of the time, with or without reasonable accommodation.
Required to be 18 years or older.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with HRIS and timekeeping systems, including absence and leave integrations, exception reporting, and data reconciliation.
Demonstrated ability to partner with external vendors and internal stakeholders to resolve complex leave, time, and pay issues.
Experience creating dashboards, reports, or analyses to identify trends and drive process improvements.

Responsibilities

Ensuring employees experience accurate, timely, and compliant leave, disability, and absence administration
Managing intake and coding of absences through automated integrations, vendor interfaces, and manual adjustments
Monitoring exception reports and resolving issues before they impact employees
Researching, analyzing, and resolving complex timekeeping and leave scenarios, including escalations, historical corrections, and new requests
Serving as a trusted resource to employees, managers, HR Business Partners, and Employee Relations by answering questions related to leave eligibility, pay coordination, and protected time under company policy, collective bargaining agreements, and California regulations
Collaborating closely with external vendors and internal partners to ensure service agreements, data accuracy, and compliance standards are consistently met
Analyzing absence trends, building dashboards, supporting system testing, and participating in integrated disability and absence management initiatives