(HR) Senior Payroll Specialist

Alongside your hands-on payroll responsibilities, you’ll act as a advisor on payroll, tax, benefits, and employment-related matters, proactively identifying risks and helping the wider HR organization understand and navigate payroll requirements.

What you’ll do

Payroll Ownership & Compliance

• Own and oversee payroll activities for the Netherlands, UK, and Spain, ensuring payroll is accurate, timely, compliant, and well controlled.
• Act as a subject-matter expert on payroll legislation, regulations, authorities, and best practices across your countries.
• Ensure compliance with all statutory reporting, year-end processes, tax requirements, and payroll obligations.
• Identify, assess, and proactively manage payroll risks, escalating material issues where appropriate.
• Maintain accurate employee records and ensure payroll, compensation, benefits, and tax data is complete and up to date.

Advisory & Stakeholder Management

• Provide clear, practical advice on payroll, tax, benefits, and regulatory matters.
• Partner closely with Finance and HR to ensure employee data flows accurately between systems and payroll.
• Translate complex payroll requirements into clear guidance that managers and employees can understand and act on.
• Partner with our vendors in each location to ensure accurate payroll runs

Process Improvement & Automation

• Challenge the status quo. Continuously review payroll processes, controls, and ways of working to identify opportunities to simplify and improve.
• Identify opportunities to eliminate manual work through automation, integrations, AI, better use of existing systems, or improved process design.
• Develop and implement scalable payroll processes, policies, controls, and documentation.
• Help build payroll operations that can scale as Backbase grows internationally.

Operational Support

• Proactively manage the payroll ticket pipeline, incoming requests, and escalations, ensuring issues are resolved efficiently and with appropriate urgency.
• Take ownership of complex or sensitive payroll cases and drive them to resolution.
• Maintain high-quality payroll documentation, including policies, templates, process documentation, employee guidance, and Confluence content.

What you bring

Experience & Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in payroll, ideally in a senior payroll specialist, payroll officer, or similar role.
• PDL (Praktijkdiploma Loonadministratie) or equivalent relevant payroll qualification.
• Strong knowledge and hands-on experience with Dutch + UK payroll legislation, regulations, and institutions
• Experience working with Spanish payroll is highly desirable.
• Experience working in an international, multi-country HR environment.
• Native-level Dutch and fluent English, both written and spoken.
• Experience working with payroll systems and HRIS platforms; experience with multiple systems/providers is a plus.

About You

We care as much about how you approach problems as your technical payroll expertise.

• You’re a self-starter. You don’t wait for someone to give you a perfectly defined task or solution.
• You thrive in ambiguity. You can make progress even when information is incomplete, processes are unclear, or ownership is fragmented.
• You’re a problem solver. When something doesn’t work, you investigate the root cause and figure out how to fix it.
• You think automation-first. You actively look for opportunities to automate repetitive work, improve integrations, leverage AI, and reduce manual effort.
• You take ownership. You follow problems through to resolution rather than passing them from team to team.
• You’re commercially minded. You understand that payroll needs to be compliant and controlled, but also practical, efficient, and scalable.