Manager - Payroll

Role Overview
Air India Express is looking for a seasoned and highly accountable Manager – Payroll (Mainly Indian Region and Middle East Region exposure) to lead and manage large-scale payroll operations with strong governance, operational excellence, statutory compliance, and stakeholder management.
This role is critical considering the scale, complexity, and compliance sensitivity associated with payroll operations in a large aviation organization. The incumbent will be responsible for driving payroll strategy, strengthening governance frameworks, managing audits and compliance, ensuring operational excellence, enhancing employee experience, and leading payroll transformation and process improvement initiatives.
The role will also play a key part in identifying payroll inefficiencies, leakages, control gaps, and revenue loss areas, while implementing robust controls and governance mechanisms to strengthen payroll accuracy, cost optimization, and financial discipline. The ideal candidate should have strong exposure to enterprise-scale payroll environments, preferably managing payroll operations for employee populations of 15,000+ employees within large corporates and handling APAC payroll operations or multi-country payroll environments.
This is a highly visible role requiring strong ownership, maturity, stakeholder management, problem-solving ability, and operational leadership.

Key Responsibilities:

Payroll Strategy & Operations Management
• Lead and drive payroll strategy and governance for employees across the APAC region
• Develop scalable payroll operating frameworks aligned with organizational growth and business priorities
• Lead and manage end-to-end payroll operations including salary processing, reimbursements, incentives, arrears, and F&F; settlements
• Drive strong governance, controls, validations, and reconciliations across payroll processes
• Identify and eliminate payroll leakages, overpayments, duplicate payouts, compliance risks, and control gaps impacting organizational cost and revenue integrity
• Ensure payroll accuracy, confidentiality, and SLA adherence in high-volume payroll environments

Compliance & Governance
• Ensure compliance with payroll regulations, taxation, and statutory requirements across APAC markets
• Lead payroll audits, statutory reconciliations, filings, challans, and governance reviews
• Strengthen SOPs, maker-checker controls, and payroll governance mechanisms
• Ensure timely implementation of regulatory and taxation changes

Stakeholder & Vendor Management
• Partner with HR, Finance, Legal, Taxation, Audit, and leadership stakeholders
• Manage payroll vendors and ensure SLA adherence and service quality
• Present payroll MIS, dashboards, compliance reports, and operational insights to leadership

Process Improvement & Transformation
• Drive payroll automation, optimization, and cost-efficiency initiatives
• Lead payroll transformation and process standardization projects
• Support payroll system enhancements and stabilization initiatives
• Ensure strong documentation and knowledge management practices

Required Qualifications
Education
• Regular Full-time MBA / PGDM preferred, full-time graduation mandatory
• B.Com / M.Com background preferred

Experience
• 12–18 years of progressive payroll experience managing large-scale payroll operations
• Strong experience handling payroll operations for large employee populations (preferably 15,000+ employees)
• Prior experience working with large corporates / enterprise-scale organizations is mandatory
• Experience managing APAC payroll operations or multi-country payroll environments is strongly preferred
• Strong exposure to payroll governance, payroll strategy, audits, statutory compliance, reconciliations, and enterprise-grade process controls
• Hands-on experience working on SAP payroll systems is mandatory
• Experience on PeopleStrong will be an added advantage