At Terracotta – Driving Business Growth in Recruitment, Outsourcing & Corporate Services
We are a leading outsourcing company in the UAE, delivering recruitment, manpower, visa outsourcing, EOR/PEO, business setup, PRO services, and corporate solutions across the region. We are currently hiring an experienced Senior Payroll Specialist to lead our outsourcing operations and drive excellence across onboarding, compliance, and client management
Position: Senior Payroll Specialist
Location: Abu Dhabi (Onsite – Full Tim
Department: EOR & Staffing Solutions
Key Responsibilities
Payroll & Compliance Experience
- Deep understanding of payroll computation methodology, including gross-to-net calculations, accruals, provisions, retroactive adjustments, leave salary, EOSB, allowances, and deductions
- Strong knowledge of UAE Labour Law, employment contracts, WPS (SIF), and payroll compliance requirements
- Experience managing complex payroll structures across blue-collar and high-volume white-collar workforce
Commercial & Financial Acumen
- Ability to interpret payroll as a financial model, including cost allocation, payroll provisions, accruals, workforce costing, and P&L improvements
- Strong understanding of payroll's impact on client billing, cost-to-client mapping, recharge models, margin sensitivity, and utilization versus cost
- Proven ability to identify and mitigate payroll, billing, and revenue leakage risks
Analytical & Business Capability
- Ability to interpret client contracts, compensation structures, and commercial agreements to ensure payroll and billing accruals
- Must be capable of validating and challenging payroll system outputs rather than simply processing transactions
- Advanced Excel skills, including reconciliations, variance analysis, pivot tables, lookups, and large dataset management
Qualifications & Experience
- 4–8 years of UAE payroll experience within staffing, outsourcing, EOR/PEO, manpower supply, workforce solutions, or shared services environments.
- Minimum 2 years of team leadership or supervisory experience leading at least 2-3
members
- Proven experience managing high-volume payrolls across multiple clients, entities, and workforce categories.
- Not limited to HRMS execution (SAP/Oracle/D365 etc. is secondary)
- Must be able to challenge system outputs, not just process them
- Must understand how payroll decisions impact finance, billing, and compliance simultaneously
- Strong ability to work with Finance, Operations, and Legal teams on payroll design and controls
