---
title: '(HR) Senior Payroll Specialist at Backbase'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/hr-senior-payroll-specialist-backbase-amsterdam-dzhwryzw5n32'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# (HR) Senior Payroll Specialist at Backbase

- **Company:** Backbase
- **Location:** Amsterdam, Netherlands
- **Posted:** 2026-09-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/workatbackbase/jobs/8184587

## Job description

The Job in Short

As a Senior Payroll Specialist, you will own the accurate, timely, and compliant delivery of payroll across the Netherlands, UK, and Spain. You’ll be a subject-matter expert and trusted advisor to employees, HR, Finance, Payroll Vendors and other stakeholders, helping us navigate complex payroll questions, legislation, and employee inquiries. But this role is about more than simply running payroll.

Backbase is a fast-moving, scrappy environment. We don’t always have perfect processes, clean data, or a neatly documented answer waiting for you. You’ll need to be a self-starter who is comfortable with ambiguity, can dig into messy processes, identify what isn’t working, and figure out how to make it better.

We’re looking for someone who doesn’t just say “that’s how we’ve always done it.” You’ll challenge inefficient ways of working, simplify processes, eliminate manual work, and look for opportunities to automate, use AI, or improve our systems and data. You’ll have the autonomy to investigate problems, bring stakeholders together, and drive solutions through to completion.

Alongside your hands-on payroll responsibilities, you’ll act as a advisor on payroll, tax, benefits, and employment-related matters, proactively identifying risks and helping the wider HR organization understand and navigate payroll requirements.

## What you’ll do

Payroll Ownership & Compliance

- Own and oversee payroll activities for the Netherlands, UK, and Spain, ensuring payroll is accurate, timely, compliant, and well controlled.
- Act as a subject-matter expert on payroll legislation, regulations, authorities, and best practices across your countries.
- Ensure compliance with all statutory reporting, year-end processes, tax requirements, and payroll obligations.
- Identify, assess, and proactively manage payroll risks, escalating material issues where appropriate.
- Maintain accurate employee records and ensure payroll, compensation, benefits, and tax data is complete and up to date.

Advisory & Stakeholder Management

- Provide clear, practical advice on payroll, tax, benefits, and regulatory matters.
- Partner closely with Finance and HR to ensure employee data flows accurately between systems and payroll.
- Translate complex payroll requirements into clear guidance that managers and employees can understand and act on.
- Partner with our vendors in each location to ensure accurate payroll runs

Process Improvement & Automation

- Challenge the status quo. Continuously review payroll processes, controls, and ways of working to identify opportunities to simplify and improve.
- Identify opportunities to eliminate manual work through automation, integrations, AI, better use of existing systems, or improved process design.
- Develop and implement scalable payroll processes, policies, controls, and documentation.
- Help build payroll operations that can scale as Backbase grows internationally.

Operational Support

- Proactively manage the payroll ticket pipeline, incoming requests, and escalations, ensuring issues are resolved efficiently and with appropriate urgency.
- Take ownership of complex or sensitive payroll cases and drive them to resolution.
- Maintain high-quality payroll documentation, including policies, templates, process documentation, employee guidance, and Confluence content.

## What you bring

## Experience & Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience in payroll, ideally in a senior payroll specialist, payroll officer, or similar role.
- PDL (Praktijkdiploma Loonadministratie) or equivalent relevant payroll qualification.
- Strong knowledge and hands-on experience with Dutch + UK payroll legislation, regulations, and institutions
- Experience working with Spanish payroll is highly desirable.
- Experience working in an international, multi-country HR environment.
- Native-level Dutch and fluent English, both written and spoken.
- Experience working with payroll systems and HRIS platforms; experience with multiple systems/providers is a plus.

## About You

We care as much about how you approach problems as your technical payroll expertise.

- You’re a self-starter. You don’t wait for someone to give you a perfectly defined task or solution.
- You thrive in ambiguity. You can make progress even when information is incomplete, processes are unclear, or ownership is fragmented.
- You’re a problem solver. When something doesn’t work, you investigate the root cause and figure out how to fix it.
- You think automation-first. You actively look for opportunities to automate repetitive work, improve integrations, leverage AI, and reduce manual effort.
- You take ownership. You follow problems through to resolution rather than passing them from team to team.
- You’re commercially minded. You understand that payroll needs to be compliant and controlled, but also practical, efficient, and scalable.

## About Backbase

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Backbase builds the AI-native Banking OS that unifies digital channels, front office, and operations so banks can coordinate customers, employees, and AI agents from one platform.
- **Entity Type**: Private (no public ticker; no funding rounds disclosed – appears organically grown)
- **Headquarters**: Amsterdam, Netherlands
- **Founded**: 2003
- **Founders**: Not publicly available (described as “founder-led” but names not stated on the provided sources)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Banking technology / financial services software
- **Target customers**: B2B – large banking institutions (120+ banks globally, serving 75M+ daily users)
- **Mission/purpose**: “We built something that didn't exist before – an AI-native Banking OS where humans and AI agents work side by side, at scale, inside real banks.”

## Products & Services
- **AI-native Banking OS**: A unified platform that sits above legacy cores, CRMs, and data platforms. It orchestrates customer engagement (digital banking, conversational banking, front-office workspaces) and banking operations (high-volume processes like disputes, payments, lending). Designed to be deployed incrementally without rip-and-replace. Includes native AI agents for governance, automation, and auditability.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: 2,000+ employees globally, 50% of team in R&D, 120+ banks as customers, 75M+ active daily users across the platform
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly available
- **Growth Signals**: Expanding globally with 16 offices across 5 continents; notable customer examples include I&M Bank (Africa) which grew onboarding from 2,000 to 21,000 new customers per month, and Techcombank (Vietnam) achieving 50% of savings and investments through digital. The company is actively hiring and describes itself as “in the middle of the biggest shift in banking’s history.”

## Competitive Advantages
- **Unified Frontline architecture** – breaks down fragmentation between digital channels, front office, and operations, enabling banks to move fast without sacrificing compliance or security
- **AI-native from the ground up** – not a bolt-on; full governance and audit trails for every AI decision
- **Progressive modernization** – works with existing cores, no big-bang migration required
- **18+ years of banking domain expertise** (since 2003) with a singular focus on banking since 2012

## Strategic Focus
- Deepening AI integration into banking workflows (Elastic Operations – scaling throughput without scaling headcount)
- Expanding global footprint (17 offices, including recent additions in Hyderabad, Riyadh, Mexico City, and Toronto)
- Continuing to shift banks from legacy fragmentation to a unified, composable operating system

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “ambition without ego,” “bias for action,” “you own what you ship,” and “the work is the standard.” Flat structure with no micromanagement.
- **Work model**: Hybrid – “Where you do your best work is up to you.” Offices in 17 locations globally.
- **Perks**: Annual learning budget, global exposure, wellness support, real ownership of projects from day one.
- **Engineering focus**: 50% of the team in R&D; real AI running in production, not just pilots.

## Sources
1. [backbase.com/careers](https://www.backbase.com/careers)
2. [backbase.com/about](https://www.backbase.com/about)
3. [backbase.com](https://www.backbase.com/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/backbase](https://www.linkedin.com/company/backbase)

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