Payroll and Benefits Manager
The Role:
The Payroll and Benefits Manager will oversee Newsela’s payroll functions, ensuring pay is processed on time, accurately, and in compliance with government regulations. You’ll have complete ownership of the end-to-end payroll process, and will serve as the primary resource to scope, build, and maintain Newsela’s payroll management system. You’ll also seek to improve how data flows from our applicant tracking system (ATS) to our HRIS to our Finance team to drive automation and efficiency wherever possible. You’ll also serve as a strategic thought leader on Newsela’s benefit offering, partnering with our Benefit Broker to ensure the current suite meets employees’ needs, complies with legal requirements, and represents cost-efficient mechanisms to attract and retain our top talent. You’ll manage open enrollment, leave administration, responding to employee questions, and providing data-driven insights to senior leadership on utilization. Reporting to the Director of People Operations, you’ll build scalable mechanisms to allow for reporting on payroll, company and department budgets and expenses, as well as scalable processes to introduce new states and jurisdictions for workers compensation coverage, tax setup, and broader benefits coverage.
Why You’ll Love This Role:
- You’ll have the opportunity to own two major employee-facing processes that impact our +400 (and growing) people.
- Your work will directly enable our team to continue building a high-engagement culture and environment, and will contribute to the growth and development of our People team as well as the teams with whom we interface.
- You’ll help set Newsela up for scale, and in doing so, you will ultimately help enable our company to deliver engaging, culturally responsive learning content to K-12 students and teachers nationwide.
Why We’ll Love You:
- You have 3+ years of experience managing multi-state payroll and knowledge of benefit administration.
- You have experience dealing with all the technical intricacies that payroll and benefits encounters, such as tax codes in a multi-state environment, benefit contributions and withholdings, all applicable deductions, etc.
- You’ve designed a benefit program, including working with vendors and brokers to evaluate health and wellness plans against the needs of your employee population.
- You’re skilled in conducting benefit info sessions and presenting recommendations to executive leadership, and are comfortable interfacing with employees, answering questions, and being the subject matter expert on benefits and payroll.
- In a hybrid working world, you’ll ensure we maintain compliance with state and local tax jurisdictions.
- You possess a keen eye for detail and integrity, ensuring the overall accuracy of employee data, while adhering to standards of ethics keeping records secure.
- You also have basic excel skills, and mastery in at least one payroll system.
Base compensation: $95,000 - $105,000. Total compensation for this role also includes incentive stock options and benefits. This compensation range may be adjusted based on actual experience.
About Newsela:
Newsela takes authentic, real world content from trusted sources and makes it instruction ready for K-12 classrooms. Each text is published at five reading levels, so content is accessible to every learner. Today, over 3.3 million teachers and 40 million students have registered with Newsela for content that's personalized to student interests, accessible to everyone, aligned to instructional standards, and attached to activities and reporting that hold teachers accountable for instruction and students accountable for their work. With over 15,000 texts on our platform and multiple new texts published every day across 20+ genres, Newsela enables educators to go deep on any subject they choose.
Why you’ll love working at Newsela:
- Health & Wellness: Access to the world’s leading medical experts for healthcare (pets included!). Discounts and resources to stay healthy: mind, body, and soul.
- Work From Home: Almost all of our roles are fully remote - tech stipend included!
- Supporting ALL Families: Supplemental programs and time off to take care of your family and yourself.
- Time Off: Flexible PTO to recharge, including Sabbatical Leave
- Inclusive Experiences: Robust DEIB curriculum, Identity & Experience Groups (Affinity Groups + Employee Resource Group), Authentic & Transparent conversations with Executive Leadership Teams, and integration of DEIB lens across Talent lifecycle processes.
- Professional Development: Holistic Learning & Development Programs that enable meaningful & inclusive experiences, programs that build future-focused competencies, cohort & community learning sessions that foster a sense of belonging, and individual development plans aligned with your personal and professional aspirations to turn goals into reality.
- Make A Difference: No matter your role or department, the work you do each day helps share the future of education and improves the lives of students and teachers.