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.
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.
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 here https://www.sona.ai/careers.
About the Role
As a Payroll Implementation Manager at Sona, you'll take end-to-end ownership of onboarding customers onto our payroll platform, from initial discovery and system configuration through to parallel runs, training, and go-live.
You'll work hands-on with the software itself, not just alongside it, partnering closely with the wider implementation team, product engineers, and payroll bureau colleagues to get every customer live cleanly. Attention to detail and end-to-end ownership matter more here than in most roles, and you'll need to be comfortable double-checking your own work and speaking up early when something doesn't look right.
This role sits within a growing customer function that's still finding its shape. You'll have direct influence over how Sona's payroll implementation process and product evolve, with a level of access to the product team that's unusual for an implementer. It's a startup pace: no bureaucracy, high-caliber colleagues, and fast-moving development, so you'll need to be comfortable operating without everything being fully defined.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end payroll implementations: discovery, system configuration, parallel runs, training, and go-live
- Configure and troubleshoot UK payroll setups, including GL and pensions configuration and RTI processing
- Identify opportunities for process improvement and take ownership of seeing them through
- Partner with Project Managers and Solutions Architects to support the wider implementation journey
- Provide ad hoc on-site customer support for training and launch, alongside remote delivery
- Use AI tools confidently in your day to day work, from reconciliation to communication
Requirements
- Proven, hands-on experience implementing UK payroll systems end-to-end, not just coordinating others who do
- Deep working knowledge of UK payroll legislation and processing
- Genuinely curious, adaptable, and comfortable with ambiguity - things won't always be fully defined
- High attention to detail and a strong sense of accountability
- Comfortable using AI in everyday tools like spreadsheets, communications, and reconciliation
- Bonus: CIPP (or equivalent) qualification, or working towards one
Benefits
- Salary: £50,000 - £60,000
- London, hybrid - 2 days a week in the office, with occasional travel to customer sites for training and launch support
- Share options
- 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
- Extra day of leave for every year of service
- Pension contributions matched up to 5%
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Enhanced parental leave & pay
- Workplace nursery salary sacrifice scheme
- Annual all expenses paid team retreats
- The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
- Professional development budget
- Unlimited free books
Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.