Leave Payroll Analyst

About us

Sparrow is the first high-tech, high-touch employee leave management solution. Our mission is to make it simple for companies to provide their employees with all kinds of leave (i.e. family, medical, etc.).

Currently, the leave management process is painful and inefficient for everyone. Company leaders struggle to keep up with regulations and processes that change frequently, and the employees going on leave are overwhelmed by bureaucracy at an exceptionally important juncture in their career. Sparrow transforms this ordinarily tedious, error-prone, complex to remain compliant, and time-consuming process into a 30-minute end-to-end experience saving teams time (20 - 40 hours per leave) and money (up to $30K per leave).

Sparrow is headquartered in San Francisco but all employees work remotely across the country. Sparrow is a diverse, highly talented, and supportive team. Together, we are hardworking, collaborative, smart, and humble—after all, we’re solving real problems.

About the role

As a Leave Payroll Analyst on Sparrow's Customer Experience team you will be responsible for preparing employee leave and payroll calculations for our customers, and will have a hand in helping us build a better product.

Here’s what you’ll do

• Provide internal support for our leave specialists with leave and payroll calculations:

  • Work with the leave specialists by preparing customized and personalized payroll plans and payroll reconciliations for our customers’ payroll teams.

  • Act responsively, accurately, and with attention to customers’ payroll deadlines.

  • Ensure correct personalized payroll plans are calculated on the Sparrow dashboard.

  • Interface and collaborate comfortably with a variety of key parties including:  leave specialists, sales and marketing, and engineering teams through various channels (instant message, email, video chat).

• Effectively collaborate with our customers’ payroll teams to ensure they love Sparrow:

  • Work with onboarding specialists to understand our customers’ payroll needs.

  • Assist with the setup of customized personalized payroll plans, payroll schedules, and payroll workflows.

  • Share best practices for leave payroll when needed.

• In collaboration with the Sparrow team, build a better product:

  • Collect and share product feedback.

  • Identify improvements in payroll calculations software and services.

  • Provide input on payroll system integrations.

  • Implement process improvements to resolve inefficiencies and address customer pain points.

About you

• 2+ years of experience in either data-focused operations, payroll, accounting, or bookkeeping.

• Excellent spreadsheet skills. Adept at using Excel functions, formulas, and cell formatting.

• Superior organization skills and detail-oriented. You're able to manage a multitude of tasks with accuracy and attention to deadlines.

• Outstanding verbal and written communication skills. Clear, empathetic communicator able to distill complex information to ensure understanding.  Is able to work with different communication styles.  

• Trustworthy. You act with discretion and can be trusted to handle confidential information appropriately. 

• Learner's mindset. Highly self-directed, adaptable, and open to feedback and implementation in a fast paced, always changing environment. 

• Someone looking for something new. This is not a traditional payroll role so you will not be doing full-cycle payroll. Instead you will create payroll plans for our customers .

• Able to become a subject matter expert. Your coworkers and Sparrow customers will look to you as a go-to resource for all things payroll.

Compensation 

• This is a full time, non-exempt hourly position. Compensation ranges from $23.53 to $29.09 per hour and is based on your legal state of residence. 

Why Sparrow?

Our work at Sparrow is impactful. We help People teams with one of the hardest parts of their job, and we support employees at a time when they need it most. We’re driven by our mission, much like a nonprofit, but with the resources and scale of a fast-growing venture-backed company.

Sparrow is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. While we are united by our excitement for the mission and product, the diversity of our experiences is one of our strengths. The Sparrow team is made up of people with all types of backgrounds, and we have teammates in 40 states and counting. To learn more about the Sparrow team and its benefits, check out our careers page.

• Build a one‑page Excel showcase that models a complex leave accrual scenario (e.g., combining FMLA, state‑specific sick leave, and PTO) using advanced formulas (ARRAY, XLOOKUP, dynamic named ranges) and a pivot‑table dashboard; attach this as a PDF or link in your resume to demonstrate the exact skill Sparrow emphasizes.
• Research the latest federal and at least two state leave regulations (California, New York) and prepare a concise 2‑minute “regulation‑impact” story you can tell in the interview, highlighting how you’d flag compliance gaps in payroll data and keep Sparrow’s platform up‑to‑date.
• Mirror Sparrow’s product language: in your cover letter and interview, reference “high‑touch, high‑tech” and explain how you’ve used automation (e.g., VBA macros or Power Query) to turn a manual leave‑payroll audit that took >30 hours into a 30‑minute routine, quantifying time saved.
• Prepare a “remote collaboration” cheat sheet: list the exact tools you use for version‑controlled Excel work (e.g., OneDrive/SharePoint with Excel Online, Teams for change logs) and give a brief example of how you ensured data integrity while working across time zones—Sparrow values seamless remote hand‑offs.
• When discussing salary, cite industry benchmarks for remote payroll analysts (e.g., Glassdoor/PayScale data showing $78‑$92 k base for U.S. remote roles) and frame your ask around the cost‑savings you’ll generate per leave (e.g., $30 k per leave), positioning your compensation as an investment in reducing overall leave expenses.