Business Systems Analyst, Payroll Systems

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg to harness the power of technology to pursue some of society’s most ambitious goals — from curing or preventing all disease to transforming how students learn.

At CZI, you’ll join a deeply collaborative, mission-driven community where your work helps drive breakthroughs across our flagship nonprofit organizations, Biohub and Learning Commons. Whether enabling scientific breakthroughs via open science and AI-powered biology or strengthening the tools teachers and students rely on every day, your contributions help turn bold ideas into real-world impact.

Our teams operate at the intersection of innovation and scale, building the infrastructure, partnerships, and capabilities that allow scientists, educators, and innovators to tackle some of the most complex challenges of our time — and to do so with urgency, integrity, and optimism.

The Team

The Operations team is a key partner in enabling Biohub’s pioneering work to combine frontier AI with frontier biology to solve disease and Learning Commons’ mission to build AI infrastructure that aligns how students learn with the tools that shape their learning experiences.

Operations includes our Central Tech, Finance, Marketing & Communications, People, and Real Estate / Workplace / Events / Facilities / Security (REWFS) teams. Together, these teams create the systems, programs, and experiences that empower our partners and colleagues across Biohub and Learning Commons to drive impact.

This work requires strategic and operational rigor, creativity, and deep collaboration. Whether designing world-class employee experiences, safeguarding data and infrastructure, or shaping how we communicate our impact, Operations plays a critical role in helping deliver meaningful change at scale.

The Opportunity

As a company we are focused on leveraging technology to help solve some of the world’s toughest challenges.  In order to support our organization’s focus on the mission, we have a similar mission within our People and Finance Systems team to leverage technology to automate manual processes, constantly innovate to optimize processes, provide first-class support as well as build solutions to enable scale and execution of the strategies and initiatives of our business partners.

Reporting to the Finance Systems Lead, this role will play a key role in streamlining, securing, and optimizing our Payroll, Planning, and Absence management processes through the Workday platform. You will work closely with the Payroll, Finance, and Total Rewards  teams and be responsible for gathering, analyzing, and documenting business requirements, translating requirements into technical specifications, ensuring compliance with IT security standards,  and implementing solutions.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What You'll Bring

• Workday and payroll expertise: 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.

Work Mode

This role is a remote position.

Compensation

The Redwood City, CA base pay range for a new hire in this role is $124,000-$170,000. New hires are typically hired into the lower portion of the range, enabling employee growth in the range over time. Actual placement in range is based on job-related skills and experience, as evaluated throughout the interview process. 

Pay ranges outside Redwood City, CA  are adjusted based on cost of labor in each respective geographical market. Your recruiter can share more about the specific pay range for your location during the hiring process.

Benefits for the Whole You 

We’re thankful to have an incredible team behind our work. To honor their commitment, we offer a wide range of benefits to support the people who make all we do possible. 

• 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 most meaningfully for them and their families, such as housing, student loan repayment, childcare, commuter costs, or other life needs.
• CZI Life of Service Gifts are awarded to employees to “live the mission” and support the causes closest to them.
• 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!

If you’re interested in a role but your previous experience doesn’t perfectly align with each qualification in the job description, we still encourage you to apply as you may be the perfect fit for this or another role.

Explore our work modes, benefits, and interview process at www.chanzuckerberg.com/careers.

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