Associate Product Manager, Payroll

Associate Product Manager, Payroll

de Anda portfolio company

Team: Payroll

Level: Associate

Location: Remote (U.S.)

Start: early November 2026

Compensation: $75,000–$80,000

THE ROLE

You are the third member of the build team, not a layer above it. In our process the specification is the constraint on throughput: nothing gets built until it is written down precisely enough for an engineer to turn it into a Technical Document and an agent to implement it. You write those specifications, you own the regression corpus that proves the engine is right, you run the tax-engine vendor and filing-partner relationships day to day, and you run the pilot customers through parallel runs. You will know U.S. payroll well, or learn it faster than anyone around you.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Write the PRDs for every payroll feature: domain model, pay-run engine, tax profiles and forms, partner gateway, outputs, time-and-attendance integration, parity features. Each with explicit acceptance criteria and worked examples in cents.

• Assemble and own the regression corpus: a sample of real pay runs from the incumbent system with their inputs and outputs, scrubbed and structured so the harness can replay them. Triage every variance the harness reports and decide whether it is a defect or an accepted difference.

• Run the tax-engine vendor relationship: sandbox access, contract questions, rate-update cadence, support escalations. Run the filing and money-movement partner selection and the relationship after.

• Own the pilot program: select 3–5 customers, run payroll in both systems for at least four pay periods across a quarter close, reconcile every run against the incumbent, and sign off first live.

• Define the year-end validation checklist with the partner and run it for pilots.

• Keep the backlog sequenced to the build plan; make scope trade-offs visible to leadership with the cost of each.

• Review agent-generated tests against your acceptance criteria; a test that passes without proving the criterion does not count.

• Write the customer-facing documentation and support playbooks for payroll alongside the CS team.

MUST HAVE

• 2–4 years in product, implementation, payroll operations or a comparable analytical role at a payroll, HCM, fintech or B2B SaaS company.

• Working knowledge of U.S. payroll: pay cycles, earnings and deductions, pre/post-tax ordering, withholding, employer taxes, quarter and year-end. You can read a payroll register and explain every line.

• Writes precise specifications: acceptance criteria, edge cases, worked numeric examples. You would rather write the tenth edge case than let it surface in a pilot.

• Comfortable with spreadsheets and SQL for reconciliation; can diff two pay runs and find the cent.

• Has managed a vendor or partner relationship with technical content.

• Has run a pilot, UAT or parallel-run program with real customers.

• Comfortable working inside an engineering teams tools: GitHub, PR review, CI results, a monorepos docs.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience at a payroll provider, PEO or payroll service bureau; familiarity with a commercial payroll tax engine.

• Time and attendance or workforce management domain.

• Multi-EIN employers, certified payroll / prevailing wage, garnishments, union payroll.

• Experience with AI-assisted development or writing specs for coding agents.

• Customer-facing documentation or support enablement.

NOT A FIT

• Product managers who delegate the detail; here you are the detail.

• Backlog administration without domain depth.

• Someone who needs a separate research or data function to assemble a corpus.

• Someone uncomfortable telling a pilot customer their payroll is wrong before it goes live.