Senior Payroll Analyst - EMEA

Responsibilities

The HR Operations team endeavors to continuously build and deliver a seamless and positive employee experience across the whole employee lifecycle. We are dedicated to leading with care and having empathy in mind. We strive to develop efficient and simple people processes, systems, policies, and programs. We aspire to ensure employees feel heard and that they are given the appropriate resources and support needed to be effective and efficient during their careers.

TikTok is seeking an experienced Payroll Assistant Manager to support the operational delivery, quality control, and team capability development across EMEA payroll. This is a critical middle-management role responsible for ensuring robust four-eye controls, stabilising multi-country payroll operations, and coaching/mentoring Payroll Analysts to deliver accurate and compliant payroll in a fast-paced, high-growth environment. The role combines hands-on payroll expertise, control governance, and people leadership.

This is a full-time position based in London, Madrid, or Dubai.

Responsibilities:
1. Payroll Delivery Oversight (Execution Excellence)
- Oversee end-to-end payroll delivery for assigned countries (UK plus selected EMEA markets)
- Ensure four-eye review is consistently applied at all payroll processing stages
- Perform deep-dive reviews during high-risk cycles (annual bonus, RSU, mid-year adjustments)
- Act as escalation point for complex payroll cases
- Partner closely with external payroll vendors

2. Control and Risk Governance
- Maintain and enhance payroll control frameworks (checklists, M2M templates, variance thresholds)
- Introduce structured exception reporting (e.g. bonus to leavers, unusual quarterly spikes)
- Ensure documentation and audit readiness
- Support root cause analysis for payroll incidents
- Drive preventive control improvements, not just reactive fixes

3. People Leadership and Capability Building
- Provide day-to-day supervision and coaching to Payroll Analysts
- Review and uplift analysts' input preparation quality
- Identify skill gaps and implement refresher training (systems, reporting, statutory logic)
- Support workload balancing across clusters
- Build reviewer capability across smaller entities (avoid single-point dependency)

4. Project and Transformation Support