Senior Workday Payroll Architect

San Francisco Office (Fremont St) · San Jose Office (First St) · 6+ years experience · Full-time · Hybrid · Posted Sep 28, 2026

At a glance

- Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast
- Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove
- We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG
- Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers
- We offer generous cash & equity compensation
- Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents

The Senior Workday Payroll Architect will own the end-to-end implementation and steady-state operations of Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence modules.
This role serves as the resident expert for US and international payroll calculations, ensuring accurate data flow and compliance across the organization.

Serve as the functional lead for Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence during the Workday implementation.
Configure and maintain Workday Payroll for US and Canada employees, including tax setup and year-end processing.
Design and operate integrations between Workday and international payroll providers.
Configure Time Tracking for hourly and non-exempt populations, including overtime and break compliance.
Build and maintain Absence plans, including accruals, statutory leave, and eligibility rules.
Manage payroll-adjacent integrations and ensure data validation between Workday, payroll results, and the general ledger.
Partner with Payroll Operations and Accounting on payroll cycles, audits, and root-cause analysis.
Design payroll processes and security to satisfy SOX ITGC and payroll control requirements.
Assess impact of Workday semi-annual releases and perform regression testing.
Develop documentation, training materials, and dashboards for business self-service.

10+ years in HRIS or payroll systems.
6+ years hands-on experience configuring Workday Payroll, Time Tracking, and Absence.
Experience taking at least one Workday Payroll implementation live as the functional lead.
Fluent in Workday payroll business processes, calculation engine, tax configuration, and retro processing.
Experience running or integrating international payroll through Workday.
Deep knowledge of US payroll fundamentals, including multi-state taxation, FLSA, and wage and hour rules.
Experience operating in a SOX or audit-facing environment.
Ability to work from the San Francisco or San Jose office 4 days per week.

Experience with configurations in Workday’s HCM, Benefit 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 such as ADP Celergo, CloudPay, Papaya Global, or Deel
Familiarity with NetSuite, Okta, Lumos, Workato, and BigQuery
IPO readiness experience including payroll control design and equity compensation processing
Experience using AI tooling to accelerate testing, documentation, or reconciliation