Who We Are
At Justworks, you’ll enjoy a welcoming and casual environment, great benefits, wellness program offerings, company retreats, and the ability to interact with and learn from leaders in the startup community. We work hard and care about our most prized asset - our people.
We’re helping businesses get off the ground by enabling them to focus on running their business. We solve HR issues. We’re data-driven and never stop iterating. If you’d like to work in a supportive, entrepreneurial environment, are interested in building something meaningful and having fun while doing it, we’d love to hear from you.
We're united by shared goals and shared motivations at Justworks. These are best summed up in our company values, which are reflected in our product and in our team.
Our Values
If this sounds like you, you’ll fit right in.
Who You Are
The Director, Payroll Business Lead is the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for the successful execution of the Payroll FY27 plan. You own the outcome — the bookings, the LTV, the margin trajectory, and the decisions that get us there.
You are a business owner first with strong General Management instincts. You treat Payroll as a P&L and a growth engine to run, not a function to coordinate. You are comfortable setting commercial strategy, informing the pricing decisions, and getting into the operational detail when the numbers are off track. You thrive in creation environments where product, pricing, and operating models are still taking shape, and you bring the structure, discipline, and financial rigor to scale the business profitably. You lead through ownership and influence rather than headcount, and you are trusted to run a business line and deliver its results.
You will report to the leader with oversight of our Acquisition System and Payroll business line, in the CMO organization.
Your Success Profile
What You Will Work On
Owning the Payroll Business and Financial Outcomes
- Serve as DRI for the Payroll annual plan, accountable for its revenue, expansion, and margin commitments.
- Orient the business around LTV, ARPC growth, and Payroll's contribution to platform-level customer and revenue growth.
- Own the commercial strategy to scale customer acquisition against the defined ICP, across both marketing-driven inbound and partnerships.
- Own the monetization, bundling, and expansion agenda, including pricing, packaging, and new paid services.
- Own the path to gross-margin break-even on cost-to-serve without compromising service quality.
- Make the trade-off and prioritization calls the plan requires, and answer for the results.
- Driving Cross-Functional Execution
- Direct execution of Payroll initiatives across Marketing, Technology, Operations, Product, Finance, Revenue and Risk & Insurance.
- Keep roadmap priorities informed by partner-facing GTM and ICP signals, with clear lead time for teams to plan against.
- Own the outcomes of the Payroll-to-PEO expansion pathway, from surfacing upgrade-ready customers to reducing migration friction.
- Land pricing and packaging into the financial plan, with new add-ons integrated naturally into acquisition and expansion.
- Identify gaps and risks in execution and drive resolution through collaboration and influence.
- Build and maintain cross-functional operating systems to keep partners and stakeholders aligned.
- Business Storytelling and Structure
- Represent Payroll in platform-level and leadership forums, grounding discussions in data, financial impact, and customer outcomes.
- Bring structure to ambiguous problems and produce the artifacts that keep the organization aligned to the plan.
- Reinforce a culture of ownership and accountability as the business matures.
Success looks like: Our Payroll business delivers its fiscal year commitments, runs on a reproducible growth motion, and operates as an owned, accountable business line.
How You Will Do Your Work
- Ownership and Accountability — operating as the DRI: full accountability for outcomes, not effort.
- Business Insight — applying knowledge of the business, unit economics, and marketplace to advance commercial goals.
- Strategic Mindset — anticipating trends and articulating credible visions that create sustainable value.
- Drives Results — achieving results even under tough conditions and with no direct functional reporting lines; owning the number and the path to it by influencing throughout our matrixed organization.
- Financial and Commercial Acumen — making sound pricing, monetization, and investment trade-offs.
- Plans and Aligns — breaking objectives into actions and aligning teams around shared commitments.
- Executive Communication and Influence — driving alignment across functions and leadership without direct authority.
In addition, all Justworkers focus on aligning their behaviors to our core values known as COGIS. It stands for: