Senior Payroll & Equity Specialist

About the Role

You'll run the programs employees feel most directly: payroll, variable compensation, equity, and benefits, across every country, entity, and contractor arrangement we operate in. You'll bring order to a complex, distributed environment — building calendars, controls, and processes that make sure people get paid accurately and on time, every time. This is a hands-on role for someone who traces issues to the source rather than passing them along, and who builds systems other people can trust.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end global payroll delivery for employees and contractors, ensuring payments, deductions, reimbursements, and changes are accurate, timely, compliant, and reconciled.
• Calculate and validate variable compensation and bonuses for executives and non-GTM employees, coordinating finalized inputs, payroll execution, controls, and reconciliation with the GTM variable-pay partner.
• Build and run a global payroll calendar with clear cutoffs, review cycles, approvals, funding timelines, and reimbursement service levels.
• Design and administer equity and long-term incentive programs — grants, vesting, exercises, terminations — maintaining accurate records and cap-table integrity in partnership with Finance and Legal.
• Own global benefits administration across markets, covering statutory and supplemental programs while balancing employee value, compliance, and cost.
• Monitor benefits utilization, market competitiveness, employee feedback, and spend; recommend changes supported by data.
• Own payroll and equity data integrity across BambooHR, Justworks, Remote, and Carta, including workflows, integrations, permissions, and reporting.
• Manage global employment operations, including EOR/PEO relationships from a payroll perspective, own provider governance — contracts, funding, service levels, reconciliations, escalations, and periodic performance reviews.
• Identify recurring failure points and manual work across these programs and implement sustainable fixes rather than workarounds.

At Fundraise Up, AI is a default tool, not an experimental one. We expect every team member to actively use AI in their day-to-day work, identify where AI can change the shape of problems in their function — from reconciliation and variance analysis to reporting and process documentation — and grow their fluency as the tools evolve.

Skills and Qualifications

Must-have:

• 7+ years of progressive experience across global payroll, total rewards, benefits, HRIS, or people operations, with meaningful ownership of multi-country payroll.
• Demonstrated experience managing direct-entity, EOR/PEO, and contractor populations across multiple jurisdictions.
• Hands-on experience calculating bonuses or variable compensation and building review and approval controls.
• Experience designing or administering equity and long-term incentive programs.
• Experience auditing an HRIS (e.g., BambooHR), including data governance, workflows, permissions, integrations, and reporting.
• Working knowledge of payroll compliance, equity tax considerations, audit requirements, and stock-based compensation accounting concepts such as ASC 718.
• Evidence of improving complex or manual processes in a scaling, distributed organization.
• Languages: Fluent Russian (required, as you’ll be working in a Russian-speaking team) and English at C1 level, both written and spoken.

Nice to have:

• Familiarity with equity platforms such as Carta, Shareworks, or Pulley.

You'll Thrive Here If You…

• You trace a discrepancy to its root cause instead of accepting the first explanation.
• You'd rather build the calendar and the checklist than answer the same question twice.
• You treat a payroll error as your problem to close out, not someone else's to escalate.
• You ask the clarifying question before the work starts, not after it's wrong.
• You can explain a stock-comp technicality to an executive in one sentence they'll actually remember.
• You hold sensitive employee information with real discretion, not just a policy about it.
• You'd rather fix the process than route around it one more time.
• You're comfortable owning ambiguity across payroll, equity, benefits, and systems in the same week.

Gross Total Compensation 281637 - 322709 RSD