Payroll Program Manager

Arketa

8d•$100,000 - $140,000

About The Position

Arketa is seeking an Embedded Payroll Program Manager to lead the strategy, process design, and success metrics for their new embedded payroll offering. This role involves being a direct point of support for partners, especially for complex or high-touch relationships. While day-to-day onboarding and support are handled by the Implementation Account Manager and Payroll Specialist, the Program Manager will design playbooks, manage the relationship with the payroll infrastructure partner, and oversee these two roles. The goal is to ensure new customers launch smoothly, support questions are resolved efficiently, and partners have access to senior-level support for their critical needs. Success will be measured by timely launches, quick support resolutions, clear documentation, and a well-defined, evolving handoff process for onboarding and support as the volume grows.

Requirements

3-5+ years in program/project management, implementation, or customer-facing operations leadership, ideally at a fintech, HR tech, or payroll company
Experience designing processes and playbooks for a customer-facing function, ideally from scratch
Strong communication skills — you'll be explaining payroll mechanics to non-experts and translating customer pain points to internal teams
Ability to operate with ambiguity; this role and its scope will evolve

Nice To Haves

People management experience, or strong readiness to manage a small team, preferred
Experience with payroll, benefits, or embedded financial products is a strong plus

Responsibilities

Design the onboarding playbook, support triage process, and escalation paths, in partnership with the Implementation Account Manager and Payroll Specialist
Define the handoff criteria between onboarding and ongoing support, and refine it as volume and the team grow
Build the documentation and Help Center foundations the rest of the team executes against
Own the roadmap and priorities for the payroll offering's customer-facing operations
Define and track key metrics: time-to-launch, onboarding capacity, support resolution time, support volume per customer, CSAT, and documentation coverage
Own the reporting cadence to leadership on how the payroll offering is performing operationally
Serve as a senior point of contact for Arketa's payroll partners, especially on complex, escalated, or strategic relationships
Step in directly on partner issues that need program-level context or cross-functional pull
Build direct partner relationships that inform how onboarding and support processes should evolve
Manage and coach the Implementation Account Manager and Payroll Specialist, and unblock escalations they can't resolve on their own
Manage the relationship with our payroll provider, and coordinate with engineering, compliance, and customer success to keep implementations and support on track
Translate recurring customer pain points into feedback for Product and Engineering