Payroll Engineering Manager

Our mission

Enable our customers to pay their workers correctly, on time, while staying compliant. That's the job, whether you're on the backend making sure a calculation is right or on the front end making sure a foreman can actually get through their day. We build for the full range of people who touch Lumber — from a Payroll Administrator who lives in Excel, catches anomalies at a glance, and expects precision, to a field worker who just needs to clock in and get paid without thinking about software at all.

Role : Payroll Engineering Manager

Team: Payroll Engineering

Location: Bangalore, India (Onsite)

Reports to: Head of Engineering, Payroll

About the role

Certified payroll, prevailing wage, union fringe calculations — this is the engine room of Lumber. Get it wrong and a contractor fails an audit. Get it right and a foreman's crew gets paid correctly, on time, every time. We're looking for a Payroll Engineering Manager to lead the team that builds and runs this engine.

You'll own the systems that calculate real money for real crews across all 50 states and Canada. That means strong engineering fundamentals, a bias for building things that don't fall over at scale, and enough curiosity about the business side — reporting, customer issues, the "why is this number wrong" conversations — to actually fix root causes, not just symptoms.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow a team of backend engineers building Lumber's payroll processing systems in Java and Spring Boot
• Own architecture decisions for high-throughput, high-accuracy payroll and compliance calculations — the kind of systems where "usually correct" isn't good enough
• Build for resilience: payroll runs on deadlines, and Friday timesheet crunch doesn't wait for your system to recover
• Bring AI tools into the team's daily workflow — code generation, testing, debugging, documentation — to help the team ship faster without cutting corners on quality
• Partner with product, compliance, and LumberCare (our CPAs and prevailing wage specialists) to translate regulatory requirements — Davis-Bacon, WH-347, CBAs, worker classification — into engineering specs
• Dig into customer-reported payroll issues alongside your team, find the root cause, and fix the class of bug, not just the ticket
• Build and maintain internal reporting and business analysis tooling so payroll operations and customer success can see what's happening without pinging engineering
• Set technical standards, run design reviews, and mentor engineers on both craft and construction-domain context

What you bring

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong hands-on Java and Spring Boot
• 2+ years managing or leading engineers, with a track record of shipping enterprise-grade systems
• Deep systems understanding — you think in terms of data consistency, failure modes, and what happens under load, not just happy-path features
• Real experience building for high performance and resilience: idempotency, retries, observability, graceful degradation
• Comfort using AI coding tools as part of a daily workflow, and a point of view on where they help and where they don't
• Experience working close to the business — building reports, digging into support escalations, or partnering directly with customer-facing teams
• Bonus: experience with payroll, HR tech, fintech, or other systems where correctness has legal or financial consequences
• Bonus: you've filed a timesheet, run payroll, or worked construction operations yourself

Why Lumber

You'll be building the compliance engine that keeps specialty contractors audit-ready — not guessing, not manually reconciling. Your team's code is the reason a superintendent doesn't get a call from the Department of Labor. That's real stakes, and real ownership.

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