Manager, Pay Strategy & Operations
About Abby Care:
Making family care possible. At Abby Care, we are tackling one of the most important and unsolved challenges of our time: family caregiving.
Over 50 million Americans are family caregivers for loved ones without pay, tools, or support. Our mission is clear and ambitious: to train and employ family caregivers so they can get paid for the care they already provide at home.
Abby Care is building a tech-powered, family-first care platform to efficiently deliver care, improve health outcomes, and provide the best-in-class experience nationwide.
We are rapidly expanding our mission and looking for passionate team members to join. Abby Care has partnered with leading insurance plans, healthcare providers, and community organizations. We’re supported by top, mission-driven VCs to empower families throughout the country.
The Role:
As we continue to expand our capacity to empower family caregivers across the nation, the teams that support this work are also growing! We are looking for a hands-on strategic operator to join as a Manager, Pay Strategy & Operations, to build and lead our payroll function during a critical phase of hypergrowth. This is a full-time hybrid position based out of our corporate HQ in San Francisco, CA.
At Abby Care, payroll isn’t just a back-office function - it is mission-critical. We employ family caregivers, meaning our payroll operations directly impact the livelihoods of the families we serve. We are looking for a high-bandwidth, strategically-minded leader with the analytical horsepower and operational depth to own the integrity, delivery, and evolution of payroll as a product, developing systems and tools that enhance caregiver experience and are best-in-class in terms of quality and delivery.
Reporting to the Director of People Operations, you will lead the Payroll team, re-architect our payroll system, and manage the operational complexity of a diverse, global workforce. This includes salaried HQ and clinical employees, a rapidly growing population of hourly caregivers, and a large network of US and international contractors. This is not just any payroll leadership opportunity as this role requires a unique blend of traits: the analytical rigor of a consultant, the financial discipline of an accountant, and the bias-for-action of an elite operator. Crucial to this role’s success is a leader who can manage our current team and processes with zero defects, while simultaneously architecting the payroll strategy and automated infrastructure we need to scale. Beyond the core operations, you will partner closely with our Engineering and Product teams to help shape the Abby Care product roadmap, ensuring our payroll integrations are a seamless part of our caregiver experience.
Key Responsibilities:
Pay Operations Strategy and Design: You will own the long-term vision for how Abby Care handles pay delivery at scale. With fresh eyes, you will evaluate our current state and build a ground-up strategy for our disbursement engine, accounting for multi-state tax complexity, Medicaid regulatory shifts, and a rapidly diversifying workforce. You are responsible for the strategic architecture of how we move money to our people, ensuring it is as efficient as it is accurate.
Internal Re-Engineering and Infrastructure: You will dive deep into our current payroll workflows to ensure zero-defect execution today. Once you understand the mechanics, you will lead the re-engineering of our internal payroll architecture, moving us away from manual workarounds and building the robust, automated back-end systems required to support a 10x increase in headcount.
Global Workforce Governance and Compliance: You will manage the operational reality of our diverse workforce, ensuring every worker type is paid with precision regardless of classification. This includes overseeing the logic for US W-2s (both HQ and caregivers), 1099s, and our international workforce. You will own the operational complexity of this multi-state environment as well, managing tax registrations, staying ahead of changing labor laws, and ensuring we remain compliant with international contractor payments.
Product Roadmap and Tooling Integration: You will serve as the primary operational Payroll stakeholder for our Engineering and Product teams. Your mission is to help evolve our proprietary charting tool into a "payroll-ready" platform. You will define the logic and requirements needed to bridge the gap between clinical data and automated pay, ensuring our internal tools eventually serve as the seamless source of truth for all caregiver compensation.
Team Leadership and Development: You will lead, mentor, and up-level a high-performing payroll team. You are responsible for fostering a culture of extreme ownership and service excellence, ensuring the team has the technical guidance and resources to support our caregivers with empathy and speed.
Cross-Functional Partnership: You will serve as the strategic bridge between People Ops, Finance, and our Operations team. You will partner closely with our Market Leaders (GMs) to ensure tight, accurate, and timely payroll operations across each caregiver market. By proactively surfacing issues and translating complex pay data into actionable insights, you will help our leadership team deliver a seamless and reliable experience for our caregivers.
Caregiver Experience and Problem Resolution: You will serve as the final escalation point for the most complex payroll inquiries, ensuring every issue is resolved with speed and empathy. Beyond individual resolution, you will treat these escalations as data points to identify systemic friction. You will lead the effort to improve our internal communications, help our team and caregivers better understand their pay and deductions, and build the self-service resources needed to provide a transparent and reliable pay experience.
Financial Integrity of Benefits and Equity: You will oversee the payroll-side architecture for benefits (401k, FSA/HSA, etc.) and equity administration. Your focus is on ensuring absolute data integrity, from precise tax withholdings and seamless reporting to the accuracy of carrier feeds. You will treat these high-stakes deductions with the same level of rigor as a financial audit, ensuring our systems and vendors stay perfectly in sync.
The Requirements:
Experience: 5+ years of professional experience. We are looking for candidates with backgrounds in high-rigor environments, such as strategic management consulting (e.g., MBB), Big Four professional services (e.g., Deloitte, EY), or strategic finance. You have transitioned from these high-rigor environments into an internal strategy or operations role within a high-growth company.
Leadership: 2+ years of direct people management experience. You have a track record of hiring, training, and developing high-performing teams.
High-Velocity Ownership: You are a self-starting powerhouse with the intellectual horsepower to navigate ambiguity and the autonomy to drive results without a pre-existing playbook. You are comfortable in a high-paced environment where the workload is significant, and you have the stamina and strategic focus to prioritize and execute across multiple critical workstreams simultaneously.
Systems Thinking and Architecture: You are a designer of processes. You have a proven track record of moving an organization from manual and messy to automated and structured. You thrive as a "builder-operator": possessing the strategic foresight to build a scalable playbook while simultaneously having the tactical grit to execute it.
Complex Program Management: You have a track record of managing high-stakes, multi-variable operations. You have the ability to navigate the diverse requirements of a global workforce, including US W-2s, 1099s, and international contractors, ensuring that every workstream is executed with total reliability and operational excellence.
Regulatory and Multi-State Navigation: You are comfortable operating in highly regulated environments. You possess the mental bandwidth to manage the nuances of multi-state labor laws and local tax jurisdictions, treating compliance as a foundational pillar of our growth rather than a reactive administrative task.
Analytical Rigor and Data Fluency: You have advanced analytical skills and a "data-first" mindset. You focus on finding root causes, can build predictive models for payroll spend, and provide actionable insights to executive leadership.
Product and Technical Collaboration: You have the ability to think strategically in terms of product requirements. While you don't need to be a developer, you are comfortable serving as the "business architect" for our Engineering and Product teams with regards to pay operations, translating complex payroll logic and requirements into clear functional needs and features for our internal tools and automated workflows.
Uncompromising Precision: You possess an unwavering commitment to accuracy. You understand that in our business, a payroll error isn't just a line item - it’s a family’s rent or groceries. You have a track record of maintaining surgical precision even while operating at the high velocity of a hypergrowth company.
Digital Operational Fluency: You thrive in a cloud-native, high-velocity environment. You possess a high degree of digital comfort and prefer agile, asynchronous workflows over static files and email chains. You are adept at using modern collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Google Workspace) to drive rapid communication, real-time transparency, and seamless cross-functional execution.
AI Fluency and Operational Leverage: You are highly fluent in leveraging AI to drive step-function improvements in operational efficiency and decision-making. You proactively identify workflows that can be automated or augmented (e.g., audits, anomaly detection, reconciliation, support triage), using AI to reduce manual effort, increase speed, and improve accuracy.
Bonus points for:
Prior product and systems experience: Experience collaborating with Product/Eng teams to build internal tools and/or significant experience implementing/migrating enterprise-grade ERP or Payroll systems (e.g., Workday, Netsuite).
Healthcare experience or highly regulated industries: Experience with Medicaid-funded programs (HCBS, CDPAP, etc.) or government-regulated payment structures where funding rules impact pay rates and overtime logic.
Previous scaling experience: You have previously helped a company scale from hundreds to thousands of employees (or $50M to $500M+ in revenue)
Our Values:
Families First
Redefining healthcare starts with how we treat the parents and children we serve. We go above and beyond for every family, building strong, lasting relationships. We continually ask ourselves, “Would we want this for our own families?”Urgency with Precision
Millions of families are waiting for care, and they cannot wait, therefore this is not your typical 9 to 5 job. We match their urgency with our own, delivering exceptional care without compromise. Here, speed and excellence go hand in hand.Relentlessly Resourceful
As an ambitious startup, we adapt quickly and make the most of limited time and resources. We solve challenges with creativity to deliver results without unnecessary complexity.Purpose with Positivity
We take our mission seriously while never losing sight of the people behind the work. Respect, kindness, memes, and coffee make us stronger as a team and better for the families we serve.Driven to Redefine What’s Possible
We are here to make healthcare better, which means asking hard questions, challenging outdated systems, and finding smarter, more compassionate ways to deliver care.
Benefits:
Competitive compensation packages that reflect the value you bring. We reward our team for the impact of their work – full-time employees are eligible for an annual company performance bonus.
Comprehensive health coverage that works for you. We cover 90% of your premiums and 70% for your dependents, with multiple PPO plan options to choose from for medical, vision, dental, life, and short-term disability.
Generous paid time off. We provide policies that allow you to recharge along with 10 paid company holidays.
Team bonding. We love bringing our teams together. As a full-time employee, you’ll get to connect, collaborate, and have fun through team activities and our annual company retreat.
Financial savings benefits to support your future. We support your financial well-being with HSA contributions, optional FSA and commuter benefits, and full coverage of all 401(k) account fees (employer match not currently offered).
Paid parental leave to support your growing family. We provide paid leave, so you can focus on bonding and adjusting to life as your family grows.
We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants from all backgrounds, consistent with applicable laws. Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check, satisfactory references, and any required documentation.