---
title: 'Payroll Manager at Sona'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/payroll-manager-sona-london-w16jmnxt56qs'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-05'
---

# Payroll Manager at Sona

- **Company:** Sona
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Compensation:** £70k–£80k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sona/1240bf70-bd55-4e14-bc74-9318b32ffdd2

## Job description

Frontline work keeps the world running. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, nurseries, airlines, stores, emergency services. Together they employ 80% of the global workforce, over 3 billion people, and they're among the hardest businesses anywhere to run. By-the-minute scheduling, HR and payroll make them far more operationally complex than the average office, yet just 1% of venture funding has ever gone to software built for them.

Rising costs, wage increases, labour shortages and tighter regulation have made fixing that urgent. Sona is the AI-native workforce management platform for frontline organisations, with agents that match staffing to real demand and take the admin load off managers. That's a $500bn+ market the software industry has mostly walked past.

We've raised over $100M from N47, Felicis, Gradient and Northzone, signed more than 100 enterprise customers across the UK and US, and opened offices in London, New York, Austin and Lisbon. More on working at Sona here https://www.sona.ai/careers.

## About the Role

We're growing our payroll bureau fast and looking for a Payroll Manager to lead a team of Payroll Specialists, driving accuracy, compliance and client experience across their portfolio. This is a people-management role: you'll coach and develop your team, own escalations, and stay hands-on with payroll when it matters.

You'll also be a driving force behind automation and continuous improvement, using AI to cut manual effort and building best-practice, auditable payroll flows as you go.

## Responsibilities

- Lead, coach and develop a team of Senior Payroll Specialists, Payroll Specialists and Payroll Assistants, signing off their output before it reaches clients
- Act as senior point of contact for your team's client payrolls, stepping in hands-on for onboarding or escalations
- Advise clients directly on legislative and regulatory change, and keep the team compliant with a regular gap analysis
- Own the team's support ticket queue and drive continuous improvement against KPIs and SLAs
- Lead incident resolution and root-cause analysis, escalating major issues to the Head of Payroll Bureau
- Identify and implement AI and automation opportunities, and coach the team to build their own
- Ensure Tax Year-End processing is accurate and on time, and review the team's BACS payments

## Requirements

- Proven, hands-on experience as a Payroll Manager, including in bureau/outsourced environments with enterprise clients
- Strong track record coaching and developing a payroll team, combining technical knowledge with people management
- Comfortable managing the variability of multiple payrolls across different industries within a bureau
- Strong background in payroll compliance and audit, with good working knowledge of payroll/HR systems and GL structures
- Bonus: Republic of Ireland payroll experience, CIPP qualification (or working towards one), demonstrable use of AI to automate payroll work

## Benefits

- Salary: £70,000 - £80,000
- Hybrid working - 2+ days/week in our London office (Soho)
- Share options
- 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days)
- Extra day of leave for every year of service
- Pension contributions matched up to 5%
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Enhanced parental leave & pay
- Salary sacrifice childcare scheme (Workplace Nursery)
- Annual all expenses paid team retreats
- The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office
- Professional development budget
- Unlimited free books

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.

## About Sona

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sona is a next-generation, AI-powered workforce management platform built for large, complex frontline enterprises in hospitality, social care, retail, and logistics.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $45M raised April 2026)
- **Headquarters**: London, United Kingdom
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: Steffen Wulff Petersen (CEO), Oli Johnson (CFO), Ben Dixon (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Workforce Management (WFM) Software, Human Capital Management (HCM), AI for Frontline Operations
- **Target customers**: Large, multi-site frontline enterprises with 250+ employees in hospitality, social care, retail, and logistics (B2B, Enterprise).
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To future-proof frontline operators with intelligent AI, replacing outdated legacy systems and unifying scheduling, HR, payroll, and engagement.

## Products & Services
- **Sona Platform**: An end-to-end, AI-first workforce management platform that combines Scheduling, Time & Attendance, HR, Payroll, and Employee Engagement. It is designed for complex, multi-site operations with variable demand.
- **Raffy (AI Assistant)**: An AI-powered assistant that helps managers make better decisions by providing real-time actionable insights, demand forecasting, and automated scheduling recommendations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$115.5M**. Annual revenue is estimated at **$2.5M** (as of latest reports).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: N47 (lead), Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI Fund), Italian Founders Fund, Speedinvest. Senior Advisor: David Campbell (former Chairman/CEO of Wagamama, PizzaExpress, The Ivy Collection).
- **Growth Signals**: 
    - Headcount grew **46% YoY** to 133 employees.
    - Raised $45M Series B in April 2026.
    - Has acquired companies (Yapster, Employee Republic Limited) to expand capabilities.
    - Customers include major brands like Hawksmoor, Popeyes UK, Paul Bakery, Côte, Voyage Care, and others.
    - Claims customers typically reduce labour costs by at least 1% in the first month.

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-first Architecture**: Unlike legacy platforms that retrofit AI, Sona was built from day one with AI at its core, enabling deeper integration and smarter automation.
- **Deep Industry Expertise**: The founders previously ran a frontline business with over 10,000 employees, giving them firsthand understanding of complex operational challenges.
- **End-to-End Platform**: Unifies Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Engagement into a single system, reducing the need for multiple vendors.
- **Measurable Impact**: Proven ROI with customers seeing 1-2% labour cost reduction in the first month and 25%+ EBITDA improvement at enterprise scale.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Scaling the platform to become the category leader in AI-powered frontline workforce management. Deepening AI capabilities (demand forecasting, automated scheduling) and expanding into new verticals and geographies.
- **Direction for growth**: Continuing to win large enterprise customers, expanding the partner ecosystem, and leveraging AI to automate more operational decisions.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Values include being "AI Everywhere" (AI-first in thinking and work), "Relentless" (full ownership of outcomes), "Curious" (deep knowledge of product and customers), and "Speed" (moving fast and acting with conviction).
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Operates a **remote-first model** with offices in London, New York, Austin, and Lisbon. The company covers the cost of co-working spaces for those outside office locations. The team comes together twice a year for full-team retreats.
- **Notable Perks**:
    - **Professional Development**: Quarterly £200 budget for courses, conferences, books, and learning.
    - **Equipment**: £600 new starter budget for home office setup, plus a new MacBook. Supplementary £300 annual budget.
    - **Leave**: 25 days holiday + 10 flexible public holidays, with 1 extra day per year of tenure. Enhanced parental leave: 26 weeks full pay for primary parent, 8 weeks full pay for secondary parent.
    - **Health & Finance**: Comprehensive health insurance (Bupa in eligible countries), pension contribution (up to 5% match), and share options for all permanent employees.

## Sources
1. [getsona.com (Careers)](https://www.getsona.com/careers)
2. [linkedin.com (Sona)](https://uk.linkedin.com/company/getsona)
3. [sona.ai (About)](https://www.sona.ai/about)
4. [builtin.com (Sona)](https://builtin.com/company/sona-getsonacom)
5. [remotecorgi.co.uk (Sona)](https://www.remotecorgi.co.uk/companies/sona)

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