Director, Global Compensation

About the role

Grant Thornton is seeking a Director, Global Compensation to join the team. Approved office locations can be found below.

Responsibilities

• Lead the strategy, design, and governance of compensation across our global footprint — harmonizing pay practices across countries while respecting local markets and regulatory requirements.
• Own and evolve the global compensation strategy and pay philosophy, ensuring alignment to business goals and competitive market positioning.
• Design and maintain scalable, market-based pay structures that flex across geographies while preserving global consistency.
• Serve as the subject-matter expert, advising senior leaders on pay decisions, market positioning, and total cash competitiveness.
• Lead the development and governance of the global job architecture — job levels, ranks/progression, career paths, and technical specialty alignment that is anchored in a consistent, competency-based taxonomy.
• Oversee job mapping, leveling, and validation as roles are aligned to the global framework and migrated into HRIS systems and define a phased path to the firm’s compensation strategy (base, bonus, equity).
• Assess integration-driven role changes (scope, retention risk, market demand) and recommend base pay and bonus actions with strong change-management discipline.
• Lead the benchmarking approach and market positioning; manage survey providers (e.g., Mercer, WTW etc.) and market-pricing tools (e.g., Payfactors).
• Interpret market data to inform structure design, salary ranges, and bonus tables.
• Administer salary structures across geographies.
• Ensure compliance with all local and global regulatory requirements, including EU Pay Transparency Directive readiness and pay equity reporting across jurisdictions.
• Lead pay equity analysis and remediation planning (e.g., via Syndio) and manage compensation-related risk.
• Ensure compliance with US federal, state, and local pay regulations, minimum-wage/threshold updates, and state pay-transparency and pay-data-reporting requirements.
• Own the end-to-end administration of annual compensation cycles (base pay, bonus, equity) across geographies ensuring accurate, timely and consistent execution.
• Drive continuous process improvement across comp tools and HRIS.
• Maintain data integrity and controls — validate compensation data before system pushes, minimize ad hoc exceptions, and enforce consistent, well-documented processes.
• Contribute executive level materials with clear, data-driven insights.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of compensation professionals.
• Serve as escalation point for compensation questions from HR Business Partners, People Operations, Talent Acquisition and business leadership.

  Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in HR, Business, Finance, or related field; MBA or advanced degree preferred.
  • 10+ years of progressive compensation experience, including 3+ years leading global compensation strategy, design, and governance.
  • Demonstrated expertise in global job architecture, leveling, and pay structure design.
  • Direct experience supporting M&A compensation integration and harmonization.
  • Familiarity with global regulatory environments, including EU Pay Transparency and pay equity.
  • Strong command of compensation systems and tools (e.g., Oracle HCM, Payfactors, Syndio) and advanced Excel/analytics.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication; ability to influence and build consensus across geographies.
  • Professional certification (e.g., CCP, GRP) preferred.

  Pay

  The base salary range for this position is between $187,500 and $312,500. Placement within the pay range is at Grant Thornton’s discretion, and it is based on multiple factors, including but not limited to, job -related knowledge/skills, experience, business needs, progression within the role, geographic location, and internal equity.

  Schedule

  This position requires in-person attendance at least three days per week, either at a GT office or client site.