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Salary: USD 121,000 - 151,000 / annual
Justworks is seeking a Senior Program Manager, Compliance to lead planning, governance, and execution across the Product Compliance portfolio. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in highly regulated environments where priorities evolve quickly and complex work spans multiple teams.
You will serve as a strategic planner, program leader, and operational problem solver who brings structure to ambiguity, connects work across teams, identifies risks and dependencies early, and creates transparency and accountability to drive complex initiatives through completion. You will partner across Compliance, Operations, Product, Engineering, Accounting, Finance, Legal, Internal Audit, Security, and other teams to strengthen compliance while enabling the business to scale.
Key responsibilities include:
**Drive the Product Compliance Portfolio**: Develop and maintain an integrated view of Product Compliance priorities, initiatives, milestones, dependencies, and risks. Partner with Product Compliance leadership to prioritize work based on regulatory risk, business impact, dependencies, and available capacity. Translate priorities into executable plans with clear ownership, sequencing, milestones, and outcomes. Establish planning and reporting rhythms that provide leadership with visibility into progress, risks, dependencies, and areas requiring intervention. Drive initiatives through completion and ensure identified issues are tracked to sustainable resolution.
**Lead Complex Cross-Functional Programs**: Lead complex programs that span Product Compliance and cross-functional partners, particularly where successful outcomes require coordinated changes across Operations, Product, Engineering, Accounting, Finance, Legal, Internal Audit, or other teams. Drive program structure, planning, coordination, execution, and escalation while partnering with subject matter experts who retain responsibility for substantive compliance decisions. Identify dependencies, risks, resource constraints, and blockers early and work across teams to resolve them. A key near-term priority will be driving execution of the Compliance Risk & Remediation program, including coordinating remediation across Product Compliance and cross-functional partners and establishing governance to track identified issues through resolution.
**Build Product Compliance Governance**: Establish scalable governance for Product Compliance initiatives, including intake, prioritization, ownership, milestone tracking, risk and dependency management, escalation, and executive reporting. Develop repeatable operating rhythms that strengthen accountability and transparency across the portfolio. Create clear mechanisms for surfacing risks, decisions, and areas requiring leadership or cross-functional support.
**Strengthen the Product Compliance Operating Model**: Partner with Product Compliance leadership and subject matter experts to strengthen the operating model, including clarity of roles, responsibilities, and ownership. Improve documentation and business continuity across critical compliance processes and support sustainable control implementation. Develop meaningful measures of compliance performance, risk, and execution, while reducing single points of failure across the function.
**Enable Operational Excellence**: Identify and help drive opportunities to simplify workflows, reduce manual and duplicate work, strengthen quality and controls, and improve regulatory response and execution. Increase automation and leverage technology and AI where appropriate to improve efficiency, scalability, and sustainability.
**Measure Success**: Develop dashboards and executive reporting that provide visibility into portfolio health, remediation status, milestones, dependencies, compliance risks, control implementation, KPIs, and capacity considerations. Provide Product Compliance leadership with actionable insights and recommendations, including where priorities, resources, or cross-functional support may need to shift.
You will succeed through strategic planning, program leadership, systems thinking, operational excellence, risk management, cross-functional influence, executive communication, and continuous improvement. The role requires balancing regulatory and risk priorities with business objectives and organizational capacity while building trusted partnerships and driving outcomes across technical and business teams without direct authority.
**Requirements**
Required:
- 8+ years of program management, compliance operations, operational excellence, or related experience
- 5+ years leading complex cross-functional initiatives
- Experience working in a highly regulated environment such as payroll, HR technology, financial services, fintech, or a similarly complex industry
- Demonstrated experience translating complex regulatory, risk, operational, or control priorities into structured programs and executable plans
- Experience leading programs that require coordination across multiple business and technical functions
- Demonstrated success building roadmaps, governance processes, and executive reporting
- Experience working with risk, compliance, internal controls, audit, or remediation programs
- Strong ability to influence and drive outcomes across teams without direct authority
- Exceptional organizational, analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills
- Ability to operate effectively through ambiguity and competing priorities
Preferred:
- Experience in payroll, payroll tax, SaaS, PEO, fintech, or HR technology environments
- Experience leading compliance, risk, control, or regulatory remediation programs
- Experience with operational or process transformation
- Experience partnering with Product and Engineering teams on complex operational or compliance initiatives
- Experience with AI-enabled workflow automation or other technology-enabled process improvements
- Familiarity with enterprise risk
