Senior Payroll Specialist

Ramirez Hospitality Group•Highlands Ranch, CO

4d•$68,000 - $68,000•Hybrid

About The Position

We are hiring a Payroll Specialist to own the promise of correct and timely pay for six restaurants and one corporate office. This is a specialist seat, not a generalist one. Payroll processing is the center of the role, and you will run the full weekly cycle from timekeeping review through funding, reporting, and reconciliation. Beyond the cycle, you support the People team wherever payroll and HR overlap. This role sits at the intersection of People, Finance, and the restaurants themselves. You will work closely with the Director of People, the Director of Finance, the VP of Finance, and all six General Managers.

Requirements

Minimum 2 years of hands-on payroll processing experience, owning a cycle end-to-end.
Current working knowledge of labor law as it applies to payroll at both the federal and Colorado level, with the discipline to keep knowledge current.
A tendency to document processes and leave a trail.
Ability to be direct and kind: raise issues early to the right person without letting discrepancies linger.
Discretion to handle confidential compensation, personnel, and financial information.
Restaurant industry experience is highly valued due to the unique nature of tips, tip pooling, split shifts, overtime patterns, and seasonal swings.

Nice To Haves

Toast Payroll and Toast POS experience.
Multi-unit payroll experience.
Bilingual English/Spanish.
Payroll exports and payroll to accounting handoff experience.
Experience building payroll journal entry mappings or supporting period close.
Multi-entity payroll experience across separate EINs.
Benefits administration or deduction auditing exposure.
Advanced spreadsheet skills.

Responsibilities

Run the full weekly payroll cycle for six restaurant locations and the corporate office in Toast Payroll, including timekeeping review, tips, adjustments, retro pay, terminations, funding, and post-processing verification.
Maintain extreme attention to detail to catch misclassified punches, duplicated adjustments, rate changes without paperwork, and discrepancies before they impact downstream processes.
Track every addition and edit to payroll weekly, ensuring a log of what changed, who requested it, when it was entered, and why.
Produce clean weekly summary reporting for Finance and Ownership that is accurate, consistent, and delivered on schedule.
Identify issues that trace back to a restaurant and escalate them to the Director of People with necessary detail and documentation for correction at the store level.
Maintain working knowledge of current federal and Colorado wage and hour laws as they apply to payroll, including overtime, tip credit and tip pooling mechanics, minimum wage rules, meal and rest period treatment, final pay requirements, and recordkeeping.
Identify questionable labor positioning by understanding how a restaurant operates, such as unusual schedule or punch patterns, or incorrect coding of employees.
Build and maintain written standard operating procedures (SOPs) for payroll processes to ensure they are documentable, teachable, and repeatable.
Support the People team with tasks such as onboarding paperwork, benefits deduction accuracy, employment verifications, and personnel file integrity where HR and payroll intersect.
Treat payroll processing as a sacred responsibility, recognizing that the paychecks support families.