Job Description
Total Rewards Manager
Department: Human Resources
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Duleek
Why This Role Exists
Employees need to know they're rewarded fairly. Benefits need to work for people's real lives. And the data underpinning those decisions needs to be accurate, consistent, and ready when it matters.
Bright is a PE-backed B2B SaaS business of approximately 400 employees, operating across Ireland, the UK, and India. As we scale, reward has become a strategic priority that requires dedicated focus.
This role has been created to meet that need. You’ll own the reward and reporting function, bringing structure, rigour and strategic focus.
You'll work closely with the CPO, the Head of People Operations & Partnering, and our Finance team — and you'll be the trusted expert people come to when they have a question about their pay or their benefits.
About Bright Software Group
At Bright, we are powering the digital practice of tomorrow – today.
We deliver products that help accountants, payroll bureaus, and businesses across the UK and Ireland work smarter and win more. Our innovative solutions and outstanding customer experiences enable our customers to run their businesses efficiently and serve their customers brilliantly.
We believe understanding is the difference between working and winning.
Key Outcomes — Year One
In your first year, success looks like:
- A compensation benchmarking framework that gives managers and the CPO clear, defensible answers to pay questions.
- A smooth salary review cycle — well-prepared, well-communicated, and delivered with confidence.
- Benefits that employees understand and actually value — with measurable improvement in awareness and utilisation.
- A reporting suite that gives the CPO, ELT, and RemCom accurate, consistent data on demand.
- EU Pay Transparency obligations met on time and with confidence.
- Payroll liaison running smoothly with Finance, with no gaps in accuracy or compliance.
What You'll Do
Compensation, Pay Reviews & Compliance
- Lead the operational delivery of the annual pay review cycle — building merit models, preparing manager guidance and RemCom materials, and coordinating with HRBPs to execute across the business.
- Lead compensation benchmarking across Ireland, the UK, and India, maintaining working knowledge of how pay legislation and practice differ across jurisdictions.
- Support job evaluation and role levelling, providing market reference points for new and evolving roles.
- Develop and maintain pay bands and salary structures, with support of wider team.
- Prepare RemCom data packs, salary review scenarios, and supporting materials in advance of each RemCom meeting.
- Advise managers and HRBPs on pay decisions, acting as a trusted internal expert rather than a policy enforcer.
- Maintain a governance framework for reward decisions, clear approvals, audit trails, and version control.
- Lead Bright's EU Pay Transparency compliance programme, working with the CPO, Legal, and HRBPs to meet reporting obligations.
- Conduct and maintain pay equity analysis across all jurisdictions, identifying and flagging gaps for remediation.
Benefits
- Own benefits administration across all jurisdictions — renewals, provider relationships, and ensuring documentation is current and accessible.
- Lead the annual benefits review, benchmarking the Bright offering against market and making evidence-based recommendations.
- Drive benefits awareness and utilisation across the business.
Reporting, Analytics & Data Integrity
- Own the compensation and benefits data infrastructure — ensuring HiBob holds clean, accurate, audit-ready reward data at all times.
- Build and maintain a core reporting suite covering pay, benefits, headcount, and turnover — for CPO, ELT, RemCom, and investor reporting.
- Audit and elevate existing People reporting — identifying gaps, improving consistency, and using AI tools to increase the speed and quality of insight delivered to leadership.
- Produce accurate, structured data extracts and analysis on demand for leadership, audit, and investor review.
- Support the annual People budget planning process and manage the reward and benefits cost base on an ongoing basis.
Payroll Liaison
- Ensuring compensation changes are accurately reflected, People-side data is complete, and any HR-context queries are resolved efficiently.
- Support payroll-related compliance checks, audits, and HMRC/Revenue queries that require HR data input.
What Skills We're Looking For
Essential
- Demonstrable experience in a dedicated reward, compensation, or total reward role.
- Advanced Excel skills and strong analytical capability, you build models, interrogate data and present findings confidently to senior stakeholders.
- Experience preparing compensation data and analysis for senior leadership or governance reporting.
- Proven experience with compensation benchmarking methodologies and participation in salary surveys.
- Experience administering and reviewing employee benefits programmes.
- Working knowledge of pay equity principles and employment legislation across Ireland and UK.
- Experience working with an HRIS — ideally HiBob, but transferable.
- Confidence using AI tools to improve the speed and quality of your work.
- Experience working alongside a Finance team on payroll interfaces and data governance.
Desirable
- Experience in a PE-backed, high-growth SaaS or technology business.
- Exposure to M&A, organisational change, or multi-jurisdictional reward harmonisation.
The Attitude We're Looking For
Skills can be developed. Attitude is harder to change. We're looking for someone who:
- Takes pride in the accuracy of their data — you're the kind of person who spots an anomaly and fixes it before anyone else notices.
- Communicates clearly at all levels — you can take a complex pay analysis and explain it simply to a manager or confidently to a board.
- Builds trust quietly — people come to you with difficult pay questions because they know they'll get a straight answer.
- Is comfortable in ambiguity — this is a new role, and you'll need to build the processes alongside doing the work.
- Uses AI tools as a genuine accelerator — not because you're told to, but because you've seen what they can do.
- Brings a business lens — reward decisions have cost implications, and you hold both the people and the commercial perspective simultaneously.
Working at Bright
Bright is a collaborative culture where you can be yourself. Even at 400+ people, there is still a team feel. People are genuinely looked after here, it’s not just something we say.
You get real autonomy to learn, to grow, to make an impact. And right now is a genuinely exciting time to join. We’re growing fast, we’re investing heavily in AI, and that creates real opportunity for the business and for the people in it.
It’s a place where curious people thrive.
What you can expect:
- Hybrid working — we trust people to manage their time.
- A People team that's building something, not maintaining the status quo.
- Genuine visibility — you'll work directly with the CPO
- A company that takes AI adoption seriously — we have an active AI Champions Network, a Literacy Framework, and a CPO who will expect you to use the tools.
- Competitive salary, benefits, and a business that's going places.
