Director of Payroll

Primary Work Address: 4000 Jones Bridge Road, Chevy Chase, MD, 20815Current HHMI Employees, click here to apply via your Workday account.HHMI is focused on supporting and moving science forward in a variety of different ways ranging from conducting basic biomedical research, empowering educators, inspiring students, developing the next generation of scientists – even stretching into film and media production.  Our Headquarters is in the greater Washington, DC metro area and is home to over 300 employees with expertise in investments, communications, digital production, biomedical sciences, and everything in between.  The work housed here supports and augments the groundbreaking research conducted in HHMI labs across the nation.  As HHMI scientists continue to push boundaries in laboratories and classrooms, you can be sure that your contributions while working here are making a difference.Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the nation's largest private biomedical research philanthropies, employing roughly 2,600 people across three distinct populations: headquarters staff in Chevy Chase, Maryland; the Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia; and host-site scientists and staff embedded at more than 100 universities nationwide. HHMI is the employer of record for everyone, owning payroll, benefits, and visa sponsorship directly, which makes payroll a genuinely complex operation spanning multiple states and worker types. The Director of Payroll leads the payroll team and owns the function end to end, from day-to-day accuracy to the systems and processes behind it. Why This Role Matters HHMI is not looking for someone to keep the current payroll process running as is. The mandate is to take it apart and rebuild it from first principles into a Workday-native, AI-first operation that reflects the best available technology rather than inherited habit. Where a step survives only because it has always existed, this role is expected to say so, and where a better tool or model exists, to make the case and build toward it. Payroll also sits at the seam between Finance and People & Culture, so the role only works if that partnership holds, with People & Culture trusting this person to get pay right, explain hard tradeoffs plainly, and bring them along on change rather than spring it on them. What You Will Actually Do Redesigns the payroll process from first principles. Maps how payroll works today by finding what is slow, manual, error-prone, or simply unexamined. Then rebuilds it around best practice. Treats the current process as a starting point to question, not a constraint to preserve. Owns the payroll function end to end, including compliance and controls. Runs accurate, on-time, compliant pay across all HHMI populations, including foreign nationals, and the states and tax jurisdictions in which they work, while leading the pa...