Payroll Vendor Manager, Amazon Global Payroll team

The Amazon Payroll team within Amazon Finance Operations (FinOps) is a fast-paced, team-focused, dynamic environment. Our mission is to pay employees accurately and on time, every time, whilst keeping our costs controlled and complying with all regulatory requirements. The Amazon Payroll team is looking for an energetic, enthusiastic relationship manager with outstanding analytical, negotiation, and project management skills to join our Vendor Management team.

The Payroll Vendor Manager is responsible for payroll vendor selection, and vendor management across all countries. This position will help oversee the performance of payroll service providers (vendors) and keep all agreements current. The incumbent is required to build strong relationships with Legal, Finance Operations, Tech, Compliance, HR, and regional payroll operations teams.

This broad role is not only a relationship management role, it also focuses on Operational Excellence by partnering with Lean Six Sigma Black Belt team members to support continuous improvement of Amazon processes, aligning them with customer requirements, and delivering positive impacts in controllership, quality, and cost savings. This role may expand beyond the payroll space to support internal partners in FinOps and HR as needed. This position will initially have no direct reports.

Key job responsibilities

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Supporting the management of payroll vendor selection.
• Supporting market research activities.
• Supporting the negotiation and maintenance of contracts, ensuring reduction of cost per pay slip and alignment with Amazon's compliance and control requirements.
• Assisting and participating in vendor meetings as required.
• Analyzing and developing vendor performance data to support vendor governance.
• Analyzing vendor cost and cost improvement opportunities, monitoring monthly spending patterns, and identifying exceptions and areas for potential improvement.
• Deep diving customer pain points in a country and making recommendations for scalable solutions.
• Responding to escalations in a timely manner
• Supporting continued development of materials, techniques, and metrics to identify opportunities to improve VM tools, systems, and processes.
• Building and maintaining knowledge management tools such as wikis and shared drives.
• Training and mentoring stakeholders in vendor-related processes.

Key skills required

• Experience in payroll, HRO, or BPO services, account management, process improvement, procurement, contract negotiation, and creation. Ability to invent and simplify processes, adopt AI tools to drive efficiency, and willingness to learn the payroll cycle and collaborate across multiple teams.
• Communication, problem-solving, process improvement, stakeholder management, negotiation skills, and experience leveraging AI tools for operational improvement.

Basic qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Operations, Supply Chain Management, Engineering, or a related field
• 3+ years of vendor management, or 3+ years of relevant discipline work experience
• 3+ years of data analysis work and leveraging analytics to make decisions experience
• Experience in stakeholder management, dealing with multiple stakeholders at varied levels of the organization
• 3+ years of defining and implementing process improvement initiatives using data and metrics experience
• Experience with advanced use of Excel and using statistical analysis applications, or experience in vendor management
• 3+ years of vendor management, or 2+ years of relevant discipline work experience
• 3+ years of experience in vendor management, procurement, contract negotiation, or account management

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in payroll operations
• Experience managing and negotiating contracts and vendor relationships
• Experience delivering Lean/Six Sigma projects such as Kaizens, Greenbelts, and continuous improvement initiatives, this should include needs assessment, business case creation, scope definition, project planning and project implementation
• Experience in creating process improvements with automation and analysis, or experience in identifying, leading, and executing opportunities to improve, automate, standardize or simplify finance or business tools and processes
• Experience communicating results to senior leadership, or experience in identifying incomplete or inaccurate data, identifying the root cause and creating/implementing an escalation plan
• Master's degree (MBA or related discipline)
• Experience dealing well with ambiguity, prioritizing needs, and delivering measurable results in an agile environment
• Experience with end-to-end project management, or experience completing complex tasks quickly with little to no guidance and react with appropriate urgency to situations that require a quick turnaround
• Experience building and scaling knowledge management systems (wikis, runbooks, shared repositories).

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