Payroll Incident & Risk Lead

What this job can offer you

As a GP Incident & Risk Lead, you will spearhead the strategic development and execution of global payroll risk and incident management. You’ll lead critical programs to enhance our risk posture, drive resolution of high-impact incidents and partner across teams to embed risk-aware thinking into everyday operations.

You’ll mentor team members, evolve our frameworks, and directly influence how Remote grows with control and confidence. This is a high-visibility leadership role for someone who thrives on complexity, collaboration and continuous improvement.

What you bring

• Proven extensive experience  in payroll risk management, incident response, compliance, or operations management preferably in global payroll, finance, SaaS or regulated industries.
• Demonstrated ability to lead incident response and implement sustainable, data-driven solutions.
• Expertise in designing and scaling risk governance frameworks and tools.
• Experience mentoring or managing others in a distributed, remote-first environment.
• Strong project management skills with the ability to lead cross-functional initiatives end-to-end.
• Excellent communication and influence skills, including experience presenting to senior stakeholders.
• High emotional intelligence, sound judgment, and comfort operating in ambiguity and complexity.
• Familiarity with tools like Notion, Monday.com and RCA methodologies (e.g., 5 Whys, Fishbone) is a plus.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Risk Management & Governance

• Design and oversee the execution of global risk management frameworks for payroll operations, new product features and market expansion.
• Own and evolve the global payroll risk register, ensuring real-time visibility of critical risks and mitigation plans.
• Lead cross-functional risk assessments with Legal, Product, Payroll Ops and other operational teams to align on emerging threats and regulatory changes.
• Drive the strategic use and evolution of the Country Maturity Matrix and other risk scoring tools.
• Oversee quarterly and ad-hoc risk assessments, ensuring accurate, scalable processes and actionable outputs.
• Provide insight into key risk trends, contributing to strategic planning and audit readiness.

Incident Leadership & RCA Excellence

• Serve as the escalation point and lead coordinator for complex or high-impact payroll incidents globally.
• Establish scalable, high-trust processes for triaging, investigating, resolving, and learning from incidents.
• Lead and coach teams through Root Cause Analysis (RCA), ensuring consistency, quality, and accountability across the organization.
• Own and optimize the incident & RCA database, enabling proactive trend identification and strategic learning.
• Liaise with senior leadership and stakeholders on incident impact, resolution progress, and post-incident improvements.

Culture of Continuous Improvement

• Translate incident data, operational feedback and audit findings into cross-functional improvement initiatives.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Payroll Ops to implement system/process fixes that reduce recurrence and enhance control.
• Champion the integration of risk-aware thinking into daily team operations and decision-making.

Team Enablement & Leadership

• Mentor and develop Specialists and Managers in risk assessment, incident handling, and RCA facilitation.
• Design and deliver training sessions and simulation exercises to upskill teams in risk and incident practices.
• Foster a culture of transparency, accountability and continuous learning across the Payroll Strategy & Compliance team and wider Payroll team.

Benefits

• work from anywhere
• flexible paid time off
• flexible working hours (we are async)
• 16 weeks paid parental leave
• mental health support services
• stock options
• learning budget
• home office budget & IT equipment
• budget for local in-person social events or co-working spaces