Senior Product Manager, Payroll Platform

BambooHR • Utah | Remote, UT

11h • Remote

About The Position

BambooHR is seeking a Senior Product Manager to own the systems that payroll runs on, including data synchronization, calculation, payment operations tools, and the underlying data model. The role ensures payroll builds on shared platform services such as canonical data entities, a permission service, an event bus, and an observability stack, and adheres to the contracts those services publish.

The position leads payroll platform modernization while the successor platform matures and legacy systems continue handling production loads. The product manager plans migration sequencing to protect client paydays, evaluates the cost and risk of maintaining older systems, and partners with payroll engineering leadership on the direction of the payroll data model. The role also owns payroll access controls, audit practices, compliance and retention positions, and evidence-based documentation of system capabilities and limitations.

The role maintains a quarterly payroll roadmap, provides weekly written status updates for leadership, and coordinates operational readiness with payroll services. Within the first 180 days, success includes delivering a dated and costed legacy retirement plan, retiring at least one old system without a payroll incident, documenting an agreed data-model direction, establishing payroll permissions and audit practices as a reference for other internal tools, and validating each payroll domain against canonical platform models.

Requirements

• Feel aligned with BambooHR values.
• Have at least 5 years of product management experience.
• Have coordinated with downstream consumers at scale, such as dozens of teams reading one system's contracts.
• Demonstrate disciplined rollouts, including parallel runs, instant rollback, user acceptance testing, and release trains.
• Be able to discuss database schemas, APIs, and migration mechanics with engineers as a peer.
• Be comfortable working in regulated, sensitive-data domains and partnering with compliance counterparts.
• Use evidence to test inherited assumptions, measure before asserting, and document decisions.
• Flag risks before deadlines.

Nice To Haves

• HCM, payroll, or payroll-adjacent platform experience.
• Experience stewarding a legacy enterprise platform through a successor migration.
• Payments, money-movement, or banking-file operational experience.
• Familiarity with event-driven data architectures that replace batch and resynchronization patterns.
• A developer background.

Responsibilities

• Own payroll platform modernization by deciding what moves from legacy operational tools to replacement systems, when it moves, and how each step is sequenced to protect payroll.
• Assess the cost and risk of keeping legacy systems running, including support escalations, manual fixes, and the risk of missed pay dates.
• Own the product direction for the payroll data-model redesign with payroll engineering leadership, including evaluating event-driven streaming against full resynchronization and validating the model against canonical entities using real client examples.
• Own access and audit practices for payroll systems, including permission granularity, audit posture, least-privilege exceptions, deny-by-default rollouts, and feature-flag discipline.
• Coordinate with the security organization and build on existing platform methods for recording who did what.
• Own payroll data-retention positions, relevant regulatory changes, and the audit interface with governance, risk, and compliance teams; document decisions.
• Test assumptions about payroll-system capabilities, publish measured limits and latency curves, and document findings for leadership.
• Run quarterly payroll roadmap reviews with dated plans, provide weekly written leadership status, and coordinate operational readiness with payroll services.
• Within the first 180 days, deliver a dated legacy retirement plan with the cost of maintaining each system, and retire at least one system without a payroll incident.
• Within the first 180 days, document a payroll data-model direction agreed with engineering.
• Within the first 180 days, establish payroll permission and audit practices as a reference for other internal tools.
• Within the first 180 days, complete canonical-model validation for each payroll domain.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, life, and disability insurance.
• Generous leave policies, including 4 weeks of vacation, 12 company holidays, parental leave, and volunteer time off.
• 401(k) plan with up to 6% company match.
• $2,000 Paid-Paid Vacation bonus.
• Employee Assistance Program through Headspace.
• Professional development.
• Flexibility to thrive both inside and outside the office.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed