Solution Architect - Global Payroll and EUPT

The Role: Solution Architect - Global Payroll and EUPT

Location: Reading, UK

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: 3- Days Work from Office

Job Description:

Essential SA Experience

• Proven experience (5 years +) designing and delivering enterprise-scale technology solutions across platforms, products, or domains.
• Minimum 8 years' experience working in technology.
• Appropriate degree or relevant professional qualifications.
• Experience of systems development change life cycles, best practices and approaches.
• Deep understanding of solution architecture principles, frameworks (eg TOGAF), and best practices.
• Excellent collaboration skills with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical peers and stakeholders alike.
• Payroll Domain Expertise
• Proven experience designing and delivering global payroll solutions across multiple countries, payroll providers and legislative jurisdictions.
• Deep understanding of end-to-end payroll processes including gross-to-net calculations, taxation, statutory deductions, pensions, benefits, payroll controls and reconciliation.
• Experience defining global payroll templates, common payroll operating models and management of country-specific deviations.
• Strong knowledge of payroll data structures including earnings, allowances, bonuses, deductions, benefits, worker categories and time-related payroll data.
• Experience with payroll transformation programmes involving payroll vendor consolidation, platform replacement or country migrations.
• Experience designing payroll finance integrations including payroll journals, costing, accruals, reconciliation and General Ledger posting.
• EU Pay Transparency & Reward Expertise
• Strong understanding of EU Pay Transparency Directive requirements, including pay gap reporting, employee right-to-information requests and regulatory disclosure obligations.
• Experience designing solutions supporting pay equity analysis, compensation reporting and transparency reporting across multiple European markets.
• Ability to model and govern reward, compensation, payroll, benefits and workforce data required for EUPT reporting.
• Experience supporting complex reporting requirements spanning multiple countries, legal entities and regulatory frameworks.
• Understanding of pay analytics platforms and compensation analytics capabilities, ideally including PayAnalytics.
• Workday & P&C Technology Expertise
• Experience architecting solutions using Workday HCM, Workday Compensation and Workday reporting capabilities.
• Experience with Workday Prism and enterprise data hub patterns for consolidating payroll, HCM, reward and workforce data.
• Experience designing solutions integrating Workday with multiple external payroll providers and non-Workday HR platforms.
• Understanding of workforce, reward and employee master data management across HR and payroll ecosystems.
• Integration & Data Architecture
• Experience designing secure payroll integration architectures using SFTP, encryption, managed file transfer and batch processing patterns.
• Strong knowledge of payroll file ingestion, transformation, standardization and harmonization processes across multiple payroll vendors.
• Experience designing ETL and data enrichment pipelines supporting payroll, reward and compliance reporting solutions.
• Ability to define canonical payroll and compensation data models enabling a single source of truth across HCM, payroll and analytics platforms.
• Experience working with Azure-based integration and secure file transfer services for regulated HR and payroll data.
• Security, Compliance & Governance
• Strong understanding of GDPR, payroll data security, data retention and audit requirements.
• Experience designing solutions handling highly sensitive colleague payroll and compensation information with appropriate security controls and segregation of duties.
• Experience establishing data quality, governance and traceability controls for regulatory reporting solutions.
• Understanding of payroll compliance obligations across European markets and the impact of regulatory change on technology architecture.
• Preferred Payroll Experience
• Delivered enterprise Cloud Pay payroll transformations within a large multinational retailer.
• Experience working with multiple European payroll providers and payroll outsourcing partners.
• Experience supporting phased country-by-country deployments using a common global payroll blueprint.
• Experience designing EUPT, compensation, reward or pay-equity reporting solutions spanning multiple countries and legal entities

Desirable skills/knowledge/experience:

• Previous experience in retail, preferably with a leading and innovating retailer
• Familiarity with retail or fashion industry technology landscapes and trends
• Experience of providing technical leadership and guidance to junior peers and colleagues