Business Systems Analyst, Payroll Systems

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a mission-driven organization that uses technology to address major challenges in science and education. The Business Systems Analyst will streamline, secure, and optimize Payroll, Planning, and Absence Management processes through Workday by gathering requirements, designing and implementing solutions, and managing related projects.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain project timelines, milestones, and dependency maps. Develop and manage RACI matrices to clarify ownership across stakeholders. Facilitate status meetings, track action items, and keep workstreams on schedule. Maintain project artifacts including charters, decision logs, and meeting notes. Proactively surface risks, blockers, and scope changes to leadership
• Work closely with the Payroll, Finance, and Total Rewards teams to understand their business needs, pain points, and desired outcomes
• Document business requirements clearly. Create user stories and use cases. Assess prioritization of requests based on business impact, ease of delivery, ROI, and compliance
• Translate business requirements into technical specifications. Consider out-of-the-box/best practice application configuration options and, if needed, customizations/enhancements to the application
• Work closely with the IT team to develop, test, and deploy solutions. Coordinate activities with the business teams to test solutions and ensure solving for the desired business outcomes
• Prioritize demand, create project plans, monitor & communicate progress throughout the project lifecycle
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Explain technical and application capabilities to the business teams. Translate business requirements to the technical teams
• Continuously learn new features and trends within the Workday ecosystem, recommending potential enhancements to the system

Requirements:

• 5+ years of hands-on experience configuring Workday, including business processes, reporting, security, integrations, and related tools; plus Payroll application design and implementation experience in a rapidly scaling organization
• Deep knowledge of Payroll and Absence Management processes is required
• Demonstrated ability to identify manual, repetitive, error-prone, or low-value work and translate it into scalable automation, workflow, analytics, or AI-enabled improvement opportunities
• Ability to turn complex and ambiguous business needs into clear, actionable requirements, user stories, technical specifications, test plans, and implementation roadmaps
• Experience with Agile delivery methods, demand management, project planning, and change adoption
• Strong understanding of enterprise data management, security, privacy, auditability, and compliance considerations for employee and payroll data
• Ability to apply appropriate controls and human review to automated or AI-supported processes
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to build trusted partnerships across Payroll, Finance, Total Rewards, and IT
• Comfortable explaining technical capabilities, trade-offs, and business outcomes to nontechnical audiences
• Experience evaluating use cases through business value, feasibility, data readiness, risk, compliance, and measurable outcomes is strongly preferred