---
title: 'Payroll Specialist at Sona'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/payroll-specialist-sona-london-211bq89m5wkp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Payroll Specialist at Sona

- **Company:** Sona
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Compensation:** £35k–£45k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sona/d8eed2e3-b5fe-4267-850b-3dea6df1d41d

## 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 hiring a Payroll Specialist to join Sona's payroll bureau, taking hands-on ownership of UK payroll processing for a portfolio of our customers. Our bureau is growing fast. We're moving from around 15,000 payslips a month to roughly 22,000 by the start of Q4, driven by new customer go-lives in hospitality and care. That means the pace of the role is genuinely high, and we're hiring ahead of that curve rather than catching up after the fact. Day to day, you'll manage a portfolio of standard and mid-complexity clients across multiple pay frequencies: statutory payments, pension auto-enrolment, HMRC filings and payroll journal reconciliation. You'll also handle client queries through our support desk, working to fast turnaround times. Your work is checked by a Senior Payroll Specialist before it reaches clients, as part of our standard quality process. This isn't a conventional bureau role. Sona is a startup and the payroll team is still building its own processes and tools, so there's genuine room to shape how things work and to grow as the bureau scales. You'll be working on a product in a sector most software has ignored, and once you're through probation we support CIPP study through the apprenticeship levy.

## Responsibilities

- Own end-to-end UK payroll processing for a portfolio of Sona customers across multiple pay frequencies, covering standard and mid-complexity clients
- Manage payroll queries through our support desk, giving clients fast, proactive updates and resolving within SLA
- Process statutory payments, court orders, standard holiday pay calculations, Alabaster reviews and NMW checks for your own portfolio
- Handle workplace pension auto-enrolment, contributions, reconciliations and submissions, flagging any miscalculated contributions for investigation
- Upload, reconcile and submit payments across BACS, Faster Payments and SEPA, and manage payroll journal uploads and reconciliations
- Manage HMRC filings (FPS, EPS) and year-end processing for your portfolio, escalating disputed or mis-allocated PAYE cases to your Senior or the Payroll Manager
- Build strong working relationships with clients, including attending client meetings when needed, and flag product bugs to Engineering as you spot them
- Spot and flag process gaps or improvements within your own portfolio, and support Payroll Assistants and Senior Payroll Specialists with day-to-day queries

## Requirements

- 2+ years hands-on experience processing multiple UK payrolls independently
- Experience within a bureau or outsourced payroll environment is a bonus
- Good working knowledge of UK payroll and tax compliance, including tax calculations and filing and payment requirements
- Confident managing a busy queue of support tickets, with strong organisational skills and clear written and verbal communication
- Comfortable in Excel (VLOOKUPs, pivot tables, concatenation) and Google Suite
- Methodical and accurate under volume, and quick to flag issues rather than let them become problems
- Bonus: CIPP or equivalent qualification, exposure to Irish payroll (PAYE, PRSI, USC), or confidence using AI tools in your day-to-day work

## Benefits

- Salary: £35,000 - £45,000
- 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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- [Business Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-sona-new-york-vdnjckw5j6mp) — New York, NY
- [Business Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-sona-london-h6n849tkpthk) — London, United Kingdom
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