Payroll Specialist

Every person who works here trusts us with the most personal thing a company handles for them: whether they get paid correctly and on time. That trust is the promise underneath every other promise we make to our team. We are hiring a Payroll Specialist to own that promise for six restaurants and one corporate office.

About the Role

This is a specialist seat, not a generalist one. Payroll processing is the center of the role, and you will run the full weekly cycle from timekeeping review through funding, reporting, and reconciliation. Beyond the cycle, you support the People team wherever payroll and HR overlap. This role sits at the intersection of People, Finance, and the restaurants themselves. You will work closely with the Director of People, the Director of Finance, the VP of Finance, and all six General Managers.

Responsibilities

• The Weekly Payroll Cycle: Full processing for six restaurant locations and the corporate office in Toast Payroll. Timekeeping review, tips, adjustments, retro pay, terminations, funding, and post-processing verification. On time, every week, with no exceptions and no surprises.
• Extreme Attention to Detail: Payroll is a job where being ninety-nine percent right is still wrong for somebody. You catch the misclassified punch, the duplicated adjustment, the rate that changed without paperwork, and the number that does not tie, before anyone downstream sees it.
• The Audit Trail: Track every addition and edit to payroll on a weekly basis. If a number changed, we know what changed, who requested it, when it was entered, and why. Nothing moves through payroll unlogged.
• Weekly Reporting to Finance and Ownership: Produce clean weekly summary reporting that Finance and Ownership can read and act on. Your reports become part of how leadership sees the business, so they need to be accurate, consistent, and delivered on schedule.
• Findings and Error Escalation: When you find an issue that traces back to a restaurant, you bring it to the Director of People with the detail and documentation needed to correct it at the store level.
• Labor Compliance: Working knowledge of current federal and Colorado wage and hour law as it applies to payroll. Overtime, tip credit and tip pooling mechanics, minimum wage rules, meal and rest period treatment, final pay requirements, and recordkeeping. When something in the file does not look compliant, you say so.
• Reading Labor Like an Operator: The best payroll people in this industry know when a schedule or a punch pattern does not make sense. Hours in a position that should not have been staffed that day, a salaried manager coded hourly, overtime that appeared without a reason. You notice it because you understand how a restaurant actually runs, not just how a spreadsheet looks.
• SOPs and Documentation: Build and maintain written standard operating procedures as your process solidifies. Everything you own should be documentable, teachable, and repeatable.
• Support to the People Team, As Needed: Onboarding paperwork, benefits deduction accuracy, employment verifications, personnel file integrity, and the day-to-day places where HR and payroll meet. Payroll comes first and this is support work, not a second job.

Requirements

• Minimum 2 years of hands-on payroll processing experience: You have owned a cycle end-to-end, not just assisted with one.
• Toast Payroll and Toast POS experience required; multi-unit strongly preferred.
• Restaurant industry experience: Tips, tip pooling, split shifts, overtime patterns, and seasonal swings behave differently in restaurants.
• Current working knowledge of labor law as it applies to payroll at both the federal and Colorado level.
• A documenter by instinct: You write things down, leave a trail, and build the procedure while learning the process.
• Direct and kind: You raise issues early, to the right person, and do not let discrepancies sit.
• Discretion: You will handle compensation, personnel, and confidential information every week.

Nice to Have

• Bilingual English/Spanish.
• Restaurant365 (R365) experience, particularly payroll exports and the payroll-to-accounting handoff.
• Experience building payroll journal entry mappings or supporting period close.
• Multi-entity payroll experience across separate EINs.
• Benefits administration or deduction auditing exposure.
• Comfort in spreadsheets at a level beyond the basics.

Benefits

• Opportunity for advancement.
• Competitive salary of $65,000.
• Benefits package including health insurance, PTO, and meal benefits at all LDP locations.
• Hybrid schedule: in office Monday through Wednesday, remote Thursday and Friday.