Senior Workday Payroll Architect
Lambda is hiring a Senior Workday Payroll Architect to own Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence end to end — from implementation design through go-live and steady-state operations — configuring US/Canada payroll, international payroll integrations, and SOX-compliant controls during a Rippling-to-Workday migration. Onsite 4 days/week in San Francisco or San Jose.
- Compensation
- $206K–$275K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco Office (Fremont St)
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 6+ years
- Category
- Architecture
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years in HRIS or payroll systems
- 6+ years hands-on configuring Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence
- Taken at least one Workday Payroll implementation live as functional lead
- Fluent in payroll business processes, calculation engine, calculated fields, pay component logic, custom reports, tax configuration, retro processing, and payroll accounting
- Experience running or integrating international payroll through Workday (Global Payroll Connect, PECI/PICOF, or custom integrations)
- Deep US payroll knowledge: multi-state taxation, FLSA, wage and hour rules (especially California), garnishments, imputed income, equity/RSU withholding, year-end
- Experience operating in a SOX or audit-facing environment with segregation of duties and payroll controls
- Operating rigor: thorough testing, documentation, and parallel runs/reconciliation before production changes
- Cross-functional partnership: translate between Payroll, People, Accounting, and Engineering
- Comfort with ambiguity and velocity at a pre-IPO company
- Enthusiastic, go-for-it attitude with root-cause drive on payroll discrepancies
Nice to have
- Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, or Absence certification (or equivalent partner experience)
- Configuration experience in Workday HCM, Benefits, and Compensation
- Experience migrating from Rippling or another all-in-one HR/payroll platform to Workday
- Workday Pro certifications in Payroll, Time Tracking, Absence, or Integrations
- Experience with international payroll providers (e.g., ADP Celergo, CloudPay, Papaya Global, Deel) and employer-of-record arrangements
- Familiarity with NetSuite, Okta, Lumos, Workato, BigQuery
- IPO readiness experience, including payroll control design and equity compensation processing
- Experience using AI tooling to accelerate testing, documentation, or reconciliation
Full description
Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU.
If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us.
Note: This position requires presence in our San Francisco or San Jose office location 4 days per week; Lambda's designated work from home day is currently Tuesday.
Business Technology at Lambda builds and scales the internal systems that power our business. We partner across the company with Finance, GTM, Engineering, and People to implement tools, automate workflows, and ensure data flows securely and accurately. Our scope spans enterprise applications, integrations, data platform and analytics, compliance automation, and all things IT.
People Technology is the pillar that owns the systems every Lambda employee touches. We are in the middle of moving Lambda from Rippling to Workday as our HRIS, and payroll, time tracking, and absence are the workstreams where getting the details right matters most: every employee feels it on payday. We are hiring a Workday Payroll, Time tracking & Absence Lead to own these modules end to end, from implementation design through go-live and into steady-state operations. You will be our resident expert on how Workday calculates, accrues, and pays, for US employees running on Workday Payroll and for our international workforce running through Workday and our global payroll providers.
This is a hands-on configuration role for someone who knows Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence deeply, understands the compliance stakes across multiple jurisdictions, and is comfortable being the person People, Finance, and Payroll Operations call when a calculation looks wrong.
What You'll Do
- Implementation: Serve as the functional lead for Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence in our Workday implementation: drive design sessions, own configuration decisions, build and test the tenant alongside our implementation partner, and sign off on readiness for cutover, parallel testing, and hypercare.
- USPayroll Configuration: Configure and maintain Workday Payroll for US & Canada employees: pay groups, earnings and deductions, pay component groups, federal, state, and local tax setup, garnishments, payroll accounting, and period-end and year-end processing (W-2s, quarterly filings) with our tax filing provider.
- International Payroll: Design and operate the flow between Workday and our international payroll providers (Workday Global Payroll Connect or PECI/PICOF-based integrations): payroll input files, results return, GL posting, and reconciliation for each country we operate in.