Payroll Specialist

• Join Sona, the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, in a full-time hybrid role in London. • Take hands-on ownership of UK payroll processing for a portfolio of customers in Sona’s payroll bureau. • Join a fast-growing bureau moving from around 15,000 payslips a month to roughly 22,000 by the start of Q4. • Manage standard and mid-complexity clients across multiple pay frequencies. • Have your work checked by a Senior Payroll Specialist as part of the standard quality process. • Study towards CIPP through the apprenticeship levy once you pass probation. • Work from the Soho office 2 or more days a week and earn £35,000–£45,000 plus share options.

• Bring 2+ years of hands-on experience processing multiple UK payrolls independently. • Show good working knowledge of UK payroll and tax compliance, including calculations, filing and payment requirements. • Manage a busy queue of support tickets confidently. • Stay organised and communicate clearly in writing and in person. • Work comfortably in Excel with VLOOKUPs, pivot tables and concatenation, plus Google Suite. • Stay methodical and accurate under volume. • Flag issues quickly rather than letting them become problems. • Commute to the Soho office 2 or more days a week.

• Bring experience within a bureau or outsourced payroll environment. • Hold a CIPP or equivalent qualification. • Show exposure to Irish payroll, including PAYE, PRSI and USC. • Use AI tools confidently in your day-to-day work.

• Own end-to-end UK payroll processing for a portfolio of customers across multiple pay frequencies. • Manage payroll queries through the support desk, resolving them within SLA. • Process statutory payments, court orders, holiday pay calculations, Alabaster reviews and NMW checks. • Handle workplace pension auto-enrolment, contributions, reconciliations and submissions. • Upload, reconcile and submit payments across BACS, Faster Payments and SEPA. • Manage payroll journal uploads and reconciliations. • Handle HMRC filings and year-end processing, escalating disputed PAYE cases. • Build strong client relationships and attend client meetings when needed. • Flag product bugs to Engineering and process gaps within your portfolio. • Support Payroll Assistants and Senior Payroll Specialists with day-to-day queries.

Sona is one of the most exciting B2B SaaS companies in the UK right now. The company has raised over $100 million from world-class investors and has grown revenue by 400% in 2023 alone. Two of the three founders, Oli Johnson and Ben Dixon, previously spent six years building Catapult, a gig platform for hospitality and retail, while Steffen Wulff Petersen came from Rocket Internet, where he helped launch Lazada, HelloFresh and Payleven. That domain expertise is a genuine differentiator: Sona is not a generic scheduling tool bolted onto HR. It is built from the ground up for complex, multi-site enterprises with hundreds or thousands of frontline staff. What stands out on Glassdoor (4.6/5 from 26 reviews, 88% recommend, 94% positive business outlook) is how consistently employees praise the team culture, the benefits and the pace of growth. The compensation sub-score is a remarkable 4.9/5. Sona offers genuinely strong benefits for a startup: Bupa health insurance, 25 days holiday plus 10 flexible public holidays (with an extra day per year of service), enhanced parental leave (26 weeks full pay for primary parents, 8 weeks for secondary), share options, pension matching up to 5%, twice-yearly team retreats and a quarterly £200 learning budget. The main things to be aware of: this is a fast-paced startup where priorities shift quickly; some reviews mention long hours and pressure around headcount management; and the team is still relatively small, at around 150 people. But with a fresh $45 million Series B led by N47, US expansion underway, and the recent launch of Forge, an enterprise AI application builder that lets customers create custom software on top of Sona's platform, the company is at a genuinely exciting inflexion point.

• Earn £35,000–£45,000 plus share options. • Study towards CIPP through the apprenticeship levy after probation. • Work hybrid, with 2 or more days a week in the Soho office. • Take 35 days of annual leave, with an extra day for every year of service. • Get pension contributions matched up to 5%. • Receive comprehensive health insurance. • Benefit from enhanced parental leave and pay. • Use a salary sacrifice childcare scheme through a workplace nursery. • Join annual all-expenses-paid team retreats. • Receive a MacBook, home office budget, professional development budget and unlimited free books.

Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take admin off managers. Frontline sectors employ 80% of the global workforce, more than 3 billion people, yet just 1% of venture funding has gone to software built for them. Sona has raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and has offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon.