Equity Compensation and Payroll Lead

Role Summary

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

Rox runs payroll for over 100 US employees through a Justworks PEO, plus an India team on EOR, and pays out variable compensation across several plan types every month. Today that work is split across three outsourced providers and one internal person, with no single owner. We have grown to a size where equity administration requires an owner as well.

We are hiring one person to own payroll, variable compensation and equity operations end to end: the determinations, the controls and the calendar. This is a Finance role, not an HR administration role, and not an accounting role.

NOT REQUIRED

• CPA
• Technical accounting, revenue recognition, or financial statement preparation
• People management (this is an individual contributor role at hire)

Responsibilities

• Payroll input control and approval
• Own the single documented path by which anything enters payroll
• Maintain maker/checker separation, a change log and a published cutoff calendar
• Review and approve the commission payout file produced by RevOps before it reaches payroll
• Own the funding calendar against the PEO debit schedule
• Non-sales variable compensation
• Performance bonuses, referral bonuses, sign-on and relocation
• Calculate, document and route for approval; maintain the audit trail
• Own the earned-versus-paid accrual file delivered to close
• Equity administration and payroll tax
• Restricted stock administration. Section 83(b) elections and their 30-day statutory deadline, filing evidence retention, and vesting and repurchase schedules
• Repurchase rights on termination, exercised within the contractual window
• ISO and NSO exercises, including W-2 reporting of disqualifying dispositions
• Cash-versus-equity elections and their payroll treatment
• Reconciliation between Carta and payroll
• Supplemental withholding, multi-state wage bases, and year-end W-2 accuracy
• Reimbursement and fringe taxability
• Own the accountable-plan test under IRC 62(c)
• Determine taxability for relocation, commuter benefits above the statutory cap, and meals
• Partner with Finance Operations, who processes reimbursements; you decide what lands on a W-2
• International and EOR administration
• Reconcile EOR invoices to the GL and to headcount
• Consolidate the current multi-provider EOR footprint
• Own the vendor relationship
• Benefits and census
• Annual renewal cycle, plan selection and contribution modeling
• Census accuracy, ACA reporting, 401(k) participant data
• PEO exit readiness
• Own the analysis and, when the company decides to move, own the transition
• Wage base continuity, state registrations, workers compensation placement, 401(k) plan spin-off

WHAT YOU WILL NOT OWN

Clear boundaries matter here, so they are stated up front.

• AP, AR, collections, expense processing — Finance Operations
• Sales commission calculation and QuotaPath administration — Revenue Operations
• Month-end close, technical accounting, financial statements — Controller
• Recruiting, performance management, employee relations — People team

You approve the commission file. You do not build it.

Requirements

• Payroll tax mechanics at depth. Multi-state withholding and wage bases, supplemental rates, quarterly and annual filings, and what changes when a company leaves a PEO.
• Equity administration across the full instrument set. Restricted stock and 83(b) mechanics, ISO versus NSO treatment and disqualifying dispositions, vesting and repurchase schedules, and reconciliation between a cap table system and payroll. You have administered more than one instrument type, and can steward an existing book while standing up a new one.
• Fringe benefit and accountable-plan taxability. You can explain the three-part test and apply it to a relocation package without looking it up.
• Controls instinct. You have designed or materially improved a payroll approval workflow. You do not process a file simply because someone sent it.
• 8+ years in payroll operations, stock plan administration, or a blended People/Finance operations role at a company that grew through the 100 to 300 employee range. Two prerequisites within that:
• You have designed a payroll approval workflow, not only operated one
• You have been through a PEO exit or a payroll platform migration

STRONGLY PREFERRED

• CPP (Certified Payroll Professional) or CEP (Certified Equity Professional)
• Direct experience with a PEO exit or a payroll platform migration
• Carta or equivalent cap table administration
• Working comfort with accruals, GL coding and reconciliation — enough to hand a clean file to accounting, not to own the close

EQUITY COMPENSATION AND PAYROLL LEAD

Rox Data Corp · San Francisco (in-person only, 5 days a week) · Finance Team

Benefits

ROLE STRUCTURE

• Base salary: $185,000 to $215,000, depending on depth of equity administration experience
• Equity: standard early-stage grant, four-year vest with a one-year cliff. The specific grant is discussed at offer
• Benefits: medical, dental and vision through the company plan; 401(k)
• Reports to the Head of Finance. Deliberately organized outside AP/AR so that payroll initiation and vendor disbursement never sit in the same seat.
• In person in the San Francisco office, five days a week. This is a company-wide Rox policy and is not negotiable.

About the Company

Four problems we care about right now

Cost-efficient inference for Clever Columns. Distill a Rox-trained model from frontier teachers so per-account enrichment runs at 1/20th the cost without quality loss. Ships first. Doesn't require trajectory attribution.

Signal classification across the public knowledge graph. A small, fast classifier that distinguishes genuine buying signals from noise across the news, jobs, and filings corpus we already ingest at scale. Powers Recommended Next Moves and Auto Prospecting. Cleanest data subset.

Personalization grounding and hallucination detection. A reward model that catches fabricated prospect context in Sequences in real time. This is the most underrated production failure mode in outbound AI. Trained on cross-customer consensus edits.

Sequencing policy under sparse, delayed rewards. Offline-to-online RL on multi-touch trajectories with intermediate signals as proxies for terminal outcomes. Long-horizon flagship. Hard. [Depends on trajectory instrumentation in progress with Platform Eng.]

These are not benchmark problems. They have real SLAs and real customers depending on them.

WHY JOIN NOW

We are at an unusual moment. Large enough to have real scale, real customers, and genuinely interesting research problems. Small enough that you are one of a handful of people shaping what the Applied Research function looks like and what it prioritizes.

Additional Information

Send a short note describing a payroll or equity process you designed or fixed, and what broke before you fixed it. We care more about that than a cover letter.