For 75 years, Charles River employees have worked together to assist in the discovery, development and safe manufacture of new drug therapies. When you join our family, you will have a significant impact on the health and well-being of people across the globe. Whether your background is in life sciences, finance, IT, sales or another area, your skills will play an important role in the work we perform. In return, we’ll help you build a career that you can feel passionate about.
The Senior Manager, APAC Payroll Operations is responsible for leading payroll operations across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, ensuring accurate, timely, and compliant payroll delivery while supporting the organization’s global payroll strategy. This role provides leadership to regional payroll teams, drives operational excellence, oversees payroll implementations and transitions, and partners closely with HR, Finance, IT, and external payroll providers. The position reports directly to the Global Director, Payroll Operations.
Position will be located in India.
Payroll & T&A Operations:
- Lead end-to-end payroll operations across assigned APAC countries, ensuring payrolls are processed accurately, on time, and in compliance with local legislation.
- Manage payroll and Time & Attendance operations, ensuring data integrity and identifying opportunities to automate manual processes.
- Standardize and continuously improve payroll processes while balancing global consistency with local country requirements.
- Ensure compliance with country-specific tax regulations, statutory reporting, social insurance, and payroll-related legislation.
- Oversee payroll reconciliations, audits, and year-end activities while ensuring all payroll records are maintained in accordance with company policies.
- Manage relationships with external payroll providers to ensure service quality, compliance, and performance expectations are met.
Payroll Implementations & Projects:
- Lead payroll implementations, system upgrades, and country transitions as part of global payroll transformation initiatives.
- Support mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and new country implementations across the APAC region.
- Participate in continuous process improvement initiatives that enhance payroll efficiency and employee experience
Compliance & Risk Management:
- Monitor legislative and regulatory changes throughout the APAC region and ensure payroll operations remain fully compliant.
- Provide guidance and training to payroll teams regarding legislative changes and regulatory requirements.
- Serve as the primary regional lead for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) payroll controls and internal compliance activities.
- Identify operational risks, escalate issues appropriately, and implement sustainable corrective actions.
Stakeholder Management & Collaboration:
- Develop strong partnerships with regional HR, Finance, Tax, Legal, IT, and external payroll vendors.
- Support the execution of the global payroll operating model while ensuring regional requirements are addressed.
- Monitor payroll KPIs, SLAs, and operational metrics, providing regular reporting and recommendations to leadership.
- Collaborate with global payroll leadership to drive consistency, governance, and best practices across all regions.
Team Leadership & Development:
- Lead, coach, and develop the APAC Payroll Operations team, fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Conduct regular one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, development planning, and succession planning.
- Promote employee engagement and professional development while maintaining high performance standards.
- Drive operational excellence through process optimization, technology adoption, and knowledge sharing.
Other Responsibilities:
- Monitor vendor performance, contractual obligations, and associated costs.
- Identify opportunities to improve operational efficiency while maintaining service quality and compliance.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in business, Finance, Accounting, Human Resources, or a related discipline required. MBA, CPA, CPP, or equivalent professional certification preferred.
Experience:
- Minimum of 10 years of progressive payroll leadership experience, including management of multi-country payroll operations within the APAC region.
- Demonstrated experience leading payroll implementations, system migrations, or global payroll transformation initiatives.
- Experience managing outsourced payroll providers and vendor relationships.
- Strong knowledge of APAC payroll legislation, tax regulations, and statutory compliance requirements.
- Previous people leadership experience managing geographically dispersed teams.
- Experience working within a multinational, matrixed organization preferred.
Preferred Experience:
- Managing payroll operations across multiple APAC countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and Hong Kong.
- Experience implementing or supporting global payroll systems such as ADP GlobalView, ADP Celergo, SAP Payroll, or similar enterprise payroll solutions.
- Experience leading payroll transitions, acquisitions, divestitures, and payroll vendor consolidations.
- Experience driving payroll process standardization, automation, and continuous improvement initiatives within a global organization.
Skills:
- Fluent written and spoken English is required.
- Additional APAC language skills are considered an asset.
- Strong project management and implementation experience.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making abilities.
- Experience with global payroll systems, HRIS platforms, and Time & Attendance solutions.
- Advanced Microsoft Excel and reporting skills preferred.
About Corporate Functions
The Corporate Functions provide operational support across Charles River in areas such as Human Resources, Finance, IT, Legal, Sales, Quality Assurance, Marketing, and Corporate Development. They partner with their colleagues across the company to develop and drive strategies and to set global standards. The functions are essential to providing a bridge between strategic vision and operational readiness, to ensure ongoing functional innovation and capability improvement.
About Charles River
Charles River is an early-stage contract research organization (CRO). We have built upon our foundation of laboratory animal medicine and science to develop a diverse portfolio of discovery and safety assessment services, both Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) and non-GLP, to support clients from target identification through preclinical development. Charles River also provides a suite of products and services to support our clients’ clinical laboratory testing needs and manufacturing activities. Utilizing this broad portfolio of products and services enables our clients to create a more flexible drug development model, which reduces their costs, enhances their productivity and effectiveness to increase speed to market.
With over 20,000 employees within 110 facilities in over 20 countries around the globe, we are strategically positioned to coordinate worldwide resources and apply multidisciplinary perspectives in resolving our client’s unique challenges. Our client base includes global pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, government agencies and hospitals and academic institutions around the world.
At Charles River, we are passionate about our role in improving the quality of people’s lives. Our mission, our excellent science and our strong sense of purpose guide us in all that we do, and we approach each day with the knowledge that our work helps to improve the health and well-being of many across the globe. We have proudly worked on 80% of the drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the past five years.
We’re committed to providing benefits that elevate your quality of life. Based on your position these may include: bonus/incentives based on performance, 401K, paid time off, stock purchase program, Health and wellness coverage, employee and family wellbeing support programs, and work life balance flexibility.
Equal Employment Opportunity
Charles River is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all qualified applicants and employees without regard to race, color, sex, religion, national origin, ancestry, age, mental or physical disability, family status, pregnancy, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws.
It is unlawful in some states (including Massachusetts) to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
If you are interested in applying to Charles River Laboratories and need special assistance or an accommodation due to a disability to complete any forms or to otherwise participate in the resume submission process, please contact a member of our Human Resources team by sending an e-mail message to [email protected]. This contact is for accommodation requests for individuals with disabilities only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.
For more information, please visit www.criver.com.
