Payroll Specialist

<p style="min-height:1.5em">Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><p style="min-height:1.5em">Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><p style="min-height:1.5em">We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.sona.ai/careers">here</a>.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>About the Role</strong></p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><p style="min-height:1.5em">We're hiring a Payroll Specialist to join Sona's payroll bureau, taking hands-on ownership of UK payroll processing for a portfolio of our customers.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Our bureau is growing fast. We're moving from around 15,000 payslips a month to roughly 22,000 by the start of Q4, driven by new customer go-lives in hospitality and care. That means the pace of the role is genuinely high, and we're hiring ahead of that curve rather than catching up after the fact.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Day to day, you'll manage a portfolio of standard and mid-complexity clients across multiple pay frequencies: statutory payments, pension auto-enrolment, HMRC filings and payroll journal reconciliation. You'll also handle client queries through our support desk, working to fast turnaround times. Your work is checked by a Senior Payroll Specialist before it reaches clients, as part of our standard quality process.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">This isn't a conventional bureau role. Sona is a startup and the payroll team is still building its own processes and tools, so there's genuine room to shape how things work and to grow as the bureau scales. You'll be working on a product in a sector most software has ignored, and once you're through probation we support CIPP study through the apprenticeship levy.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Responsibilities</strong></p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px"> </div><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Own end-to-end UK payroll processing for a portfolio of Sona customers across multiple pay frequencies, covering standard and mid-complexity clients</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Manage payroll queries through our support desk, giving clients fast, proactive updates and resolving within SLA</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Process statut