Job Description

Payroll & Benefits Administrator

Part-Time

Operations | In-Office to Hybrid, Omaha, NE | Reports to: Director of Operations

~25 hrs/week | Compensation varies depending on experience

Summary

Cordova is hiring a part-time Payroll and Benefits Administrator to run our payroll cycles and administer employee benefits for a contractor and internal workforce spread across multiple states. Payroll tax, filings, and benefits all run through vendor platforms, so this role is not about doing that work by hand — it is about knowing it well enough to verify it, catch what the platform got wrong, and resolve the exceptions. Much of our routine processing is also scripted or AI-assisted, so this person owns accuracy, compliance, and judgment calls rather than manual data entry. The right person learns our process as it runs today, masters it, and then makes it better.

Responsibilities

Payroll

• Execute multiple payroll cycles — weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly — for W-2 and 1099 workers across multiple states and jurisdictions, as well as international employee payroll.
• Run the weekly timecard cycle end to end: reconcile exports from multiple ATS and payroll systems against the active contractor roster, clear anomalies with the responsible manager, and route per-manager approval packets on deadline.
• Manage multi-state payroll tax through our payroll provider — verify new work-state and withholding setups, confirm reciprocity and state unemployment accounts are applied correctly, respond to agency notices, and reconcile quarterly and year-end filings against our own records.
• Enter and verify court-ordered wage garnishments, child support orders, and tax levies in the payroll system, confirming priority, proration, and disposable-earnings limits are applied correctly.
• Maintain payroll data across new hires, terminations, pay rate changes, withholdings, and deductions for every employment type (internal W-2, contract W-2, 1099, third-party subcontracted), in line with federal, state, and local requirements.
• Complete post-payroll reconciliations and journal entries.
• Own all new-hire onboarding.
• Own the monthly hours record — billable hours, PTO, unpaid time, and holiday by employee ID — closed out monthly for invoicing and commission reporting.

Benefits

• Administer health, dental, vision, and 401(k) enrollments, qualifying life event changes, and terminations through our benefits platform, verifying every change lands correctly in payroll.
• Track FMLA, short-term disability, and other leaves of absence, and integrate leave pay into the correct payroll run.
• Reconcile monthly benefits invoices and process carrier payments.
• Answer employee payroll and benefits questions directly and close them out quickly.

Process & Improvement

• Operate Cordova's AI-assisted payroll workflows: verify output against source data, escalate where the automation is wrong, and document exceptions precisely enough that they become rules the next automation can follow.
• Learn the process as it runs today, master it, then bring improvements you can defend from having run the cycle yourself.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of hands-on payroll administration, including multi-state payroll.
• Working knowledge of multi-state payroll tax — withholding, reciprocity, and state unemployment — sufficient to validate a provider's work, catch a bad setup, and resolve agency notices.
• Working knowledge of federal and multi-state wage and hour law and W-2 / 1099 reporting requirements.
• Paylocity, or an equivalent HRIS and payroll platform such as ADP, Paycom, or Paychex, run end to end across more than one pay cycle.
• Deel or another international payroll or EOR platform.
• Accuracy in high-volume timecard reconciliation across many contractors and multiple approving managers.
• Benefits administration through a benefits platform — enrollments, qualifying life events, and carrier invoice reconciliation.
• Intermediate Excel or Google Sheets, plus working fluency across Google Workspace.
• Comfort inside AI-assisted workflows: reviews automated output critically and reports errors instead of rubber-stamping them.
• Learns an existing process first and masters it before improving it, and researches an unfamiliar rule to its source instead of waiting to be told.
• 100% availability Monday and Tuesday for the weekly cycle, plus month-end close.
• Discretion with confidential compensation, benefits, and employee data.

Preferred Qualifications

Not blockers — strong candidates will have some, not all.

• Prior hands-on garnishment, child support order, and tax levy administration. Not required — but comfort reading an order or a state statute and working out the right answer is.
• Staffing, recruiting, or professional services payroll background.
• Vndly, Crelate, or similar VMS and ATS platforms.
• Open enrollment cycle management.
• SOPs or process documentation that was later automa