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Business Systems Analyst, Payroll Systems

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative· People & Finance Systems
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Hybrid (Remote / Redwood City, CA)$124k - $176.7kfull-timePosted 9mo ago

About the role

Role within the People and Finance Systems team focused on leveraging Workday to streamline, secure, and optimize Payroll, Planning, and Absence Management processes in a remote-friendly setup.

Responsibilities

  • Lead project management: Build and maintain project timelines, milestones, and dependency maps. Develop and manage RACI matrices to clarify ownership across stakeholders. Facilitate status meetings, track action items, and keep workstreams on schedule. Maintain project artifacts including charters, decision logs, and meeting notes. Proactively surface risks, blockers, and scope changes to leadership.
  • Gather & analyze business requirements: Work closely with the Payroll, Finance, and Total Rewards teams to understand their business needs, pain points, and desired outcomes.
  • Document & prioritize business requirements: Document business requirements clearly. Create user stories and use cases. Assess prioritization of requests based on business impact, ease of delivery, ROI, and compliance.
  • Design solutions: Translate business requirements into technical specifications. Consider out-of-the-box/best practice application configuration options and, if needed, customizations/enhancements to the application.
  • Implement solutions: Work closely with the IT team to develop, test, and deploy solutions. Coordinate activities with the business teams to test solutions and ensure solving for the desired business outcomes.
  • Manage demand and projects: Prioritize demand, create project plans, monitor & communicate progress throughout the project lifecycle.
  • Collaborate: Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Explain technical and application capabilities to the business teams. Translate business requirements to the technical teams.
  • Stay up to date with technology trends: Continuously learn new features and trends within the Workday ecosystem, recommending potential enhancements to the system.

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of hands-on experience configuring Workday, including business processes, reporting, security, integrations, and related tools; plus Payroll application design and implementation experience in a rapidly scaling organization. Deep knowledge of Payroll and Absence Management processes is required.
  • Automation and AI mindset: Demonstrated ability to identify manual, repetitive, error-prone, or low-value work and translate it into scalable automation, workflow, analytics, or AI-enabled improvement opportunities. Experience evaluating use cases through business value, feasibility, data readiness, risk, compliance, and measurable outcomes is strongly preferred.
  • Solution design and delivery discipline: Ability to turn complex and ambiguous business needs into clear, actionable requirements, user stories, technical specifications, test plans, and implementation roadmaps. Experience with Agile delivery methods, demand management, project planning, and change adoption.
  • Risk, security, and data stewardship: Strong understanding of enterprise data management, security, privacy, auditability, and compliance considerations for employee and payroll data. Ability to apply appropriate controls and human review to automated or AI-supported processes.
  • Partnership and communication: Strong analytical, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build trusted partnerships across Payroll, Finance, Total Rewards, and IT. Comfortable explaining technical capabilities, trade-offs, and business outcomes to nontechnical audiences.

Skills

Required:Workday configurationPayroll and Absence ManagementRequirements gathering & analysisAgile delivery

Benefits

  • CZI provides a generous employer match on employee 401(k) contributions to support planning for the future.
  • Annual benefit for employees that can be used for housing, student loan repayment, childcare, commuter costs, or other life needs.
  • Life of Service Gifts awarded to support the mission.
  • Paid time off to volunteer at an organization of your choice.
  • Funding for select family-forming benefits.
  • Relocation support for employees who need assistance moving to the Bay Area
  • And more
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Our Approach to Solving Society’s Toughest Problems

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative tackles society’s toughest challenges: eradicating disease, improving education, and addressing local communities.

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