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HHMI is focused on supporting and moving science forward in a variety of different ways ranging from conducting basic biomedical research, empowering educators, inspiring students, developing the next generation of scientists – even stretching into film and media production.  Our Headquarters is in the greater Washington, DC metro area and is home to over 300 employees with expertise in investments, communications, digital production, biomedical sciences, and everything in between.  The work housed here supports and augments the groundbreaking research conducted in HHMI labs across the nation.  As HHMI scientists continue to push boundaries in laboratories and classrooms, you can be sure that your contributions while working here are making a difference.

This is a role for someone who can run a function that cannot fail while rebuilding it at the same time.

HHMI is a nonprofit scientific research organization that supports scientists and educators across the country. Finance and People & Culture run the processes that pay, hire, reimburse, and support all of them. Most of those legacy processes were built for a world before Workday was mature and before AI could do real work. That world is gone. HHMI is moving procurement and expense onto Workday and is putting AI tools in the hands of every employee through EverydayAI. The open question is what the processes themselves should look like, and that is what this role answers.

HHMI’s EverydayAI initiative is putting AI tools and agents into operations across the institute. You will not need to build the business case for AI or convince leadership it matters. That work is done. What you will do is decide where AI belongs in payroll and finance processes, partner with the EverydayAI and Technology teams to build and pilot the first agents and be honest about what works and what does not.

You start with payroll, and you own it. You lead the payroll team and are accountable for every cycle running accurately and on time across the three populations. At the same time, you take the function apart end to end and redesign it: Workday-native, with AI and agents doing the work they are good at and people doing the work that needs judgment. Then you implement it with your team. You do not need to arrive as a payroll expert. You do need to learn the operation, exercise sound judgment, and lead changes that preserve accurate, on-time pay, working with an experienced payroll manager.

Once payroll is running the new way, you carry the same method into the rest of Finance and People & Culture.

You report to the Chief Financial Officer with a dotted line to the Chief of People & Culture (Human Resources). Your ideas earn their standing by making the work better for the people who do it and for the employees they serve, not by being new.

What you will actually do

• Redesign payroll from first principles. Review the mapping of how payroll actually runs today, including the workarounds and spreadsheets that never made it into the documentation. Then design the target process: what stays, what goes, what moves into Workday, what an agent handles, what a person decides. Sequence the transition so the function stays stable while it changes.

• Put AI to work where it belongs. Identify the steps where AI or agents can do the work reliably, such as reconciliation, exception triage, and routine employee questions, and the steps where they cannot. Build and pilot the first ones with the Technology and EverydayAI teams. Be honest about what works.

• Make the technology do the work. Know Workday well enough to push it, and to know when a manual step exists only because nobody configured the system to do it. Partner with the Technology and EverydayAI teams on configuration, integrations, and data so redesigned processes are built into the systems, not layered on top of them.

• Run payroll. Lead the payroll team and own the outcome: accurate, on-time pay for staff at headquarters, at Janelia, and at host institutions, with the tax, controls, and audit work done right.

• Carry the method across Finance and People & Culture. Once payroll is in motion, take on the next processes: expense, procurement, accounts payable, onboarding, benefits administration, compensation cycles, and others as they surface. Pick targets by how much pain they cause and how much they will improve. Build a repeatable way of doing this work so it outlasts you.

• Measure it. Set baselines before you change anything: cycle time, error rates, manual touches, hours spent. Report against them plainly, including when the results are not what you hoped.
   

What we are looking for

• Has led meaningful operational change. You have owned a critical function or redesigned one in close partnership with its operational leaders. You know how to improve a process while protecting the people who depend on it. Direct payroll expertise is welcome but not required

• Fluent in how processes actually run. You have sat with the people who do the work, and its stakeholders, and traced transactions from start to finish. You know the real process is never the documented one, and you know how to find the difference.

• Structures a problem fast. You can walk into an unfamiliar function, size the problem, break it into pieces, and know within weeks where the real value is. If you learned this in consulting, that is a strength here.

• Has practical experience applying AI . You have used AI tools to perform or improve operational work beyond drafting emails. You can explain what improved, how you evaluated the results, and where human review remained necessary. Experience deploying production agents is a plus, not a requirement

• Workday-fluent, or fast to get there. You have worked deeply in Workday or a comparable enterprise platform, and you understand configuration well enough to argue with a systems analyst about what is possible.

• Designs from first principles. You start from what the process needs to accomplish, not from the current steps. You are comfortable proposing that a step should not exist.

• Owns the in-between. Payroll sits between Finance, People & Culture, and Technology. You do not get stuck on whose job something is. You keep it moving until it is done.

• Leads a team through change. You can tell an experienced team that their work is going to change.

• Delivers implemented results. Your designs turn into implemented changes on a timeline. You can point to a process that runs differently because of you.
   

Nice to have

• Multi-entity or multi-state payroll experience.

• Management consulting experience focused on finance, HR, or payroll operations, especially if you led the implementation and not just the assessment.

• Experience building or deploying AI agents in a live business process.
   

What this role is not

• A traditional payroll director role. Running payroll well is the floor, not the job. If your plan is to keep the current process stable and compliant, this is not the fit.

• A consulting engagement. If you come from consulting, this is the part that changes: there is no handoff to an operations team at the end. You are the operations team, and you live with what you build.

• A systems implementation project manager. You need to understand Workday, but you are not managing the configuration queue.

• An AI adoption role. The point is not to use more AI. The point is a better process. If a step is better done by a person, say so.
   

Practical details

This is a director-level position based at HHMI headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with a hybrid schedule and occasional travel to Janelia Research Campus. You report to the Chief Financial Officer with a dotted line to the Chief of People & Culture (Human Resources), and you lead the payroll team. We expect roughly 10 to 15 years of experience in payroll, finance operations, process transformation, or management consulting focused on finance and HR operations, with meaningful hands-on AI work in the last few years. A bachelor’s degree is required.

Compensation and Benefits

Our employees are compensated from a total rewards perspective in many ways for their contributions to our mission, including competitive pay, exceptional health benefits, retirement plans, time off, and a range of recognition and wellness programs. Visit our Benefits at HHMI site to learn more. 

Hiring Pay Range

Pay Type:

The posted range reflects HHMI’s good faith estimate of the anticipated hiring salary range for this role at the time of posting. Actual hiring compensation is determined by a candidate’s qualifications, experience, and internal equity.

HHMI is an Equal Opportunity Employer

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