Payroll Tax Resolution Specialist

Salsa builds embedded payroll infrastructure — our own US and Canada payroll and tax rails — for vertical SaaS platforms like HHAeXchange, GlossGenius, and Mangomint. Their software companies sell payroll to their customers; we run it underneath.
That means when something goes wrong with an employer's payroll or taxes, it lands with us. You are the person it lands on. You'll own the hardest class of payroll problem: corrections, amendments, and tax notices — the cases where a mistake or omission from a prior quarter has quietly cascaded into three other problems, and someone has to work out the sequence of what broke and the order to fix it in.
What you'll do:

• Diagnose and resolve complex payroll corrections — misclassified wages, wrong tax jurisdictions, missed or mis-keyed setup, retroactive changes, void and reissue scenarios — including the downstream effects on quarters that have already been filed.

• Prepare and file amended returns (941-X, state and local equivalents, W-2c, Canadian equivalents) and see them through to agency acceptance.

• Work tax notices end to end: research the underlying cause, respond to the agency, negotiate abatements, and close the loop with the partner and employer.

• Trace root cause. A large share of what you see will be a product or configuration issue rather than a one-off human error, and you're the person best positioned to say so. You'll feed that back to tax operations, product, and engineering with enough specificity to get it fixed.

• Work the escalation seam between our partner-facing support teams and tax operations — taking cases that our partners' support teams can't resolve, and explaining the resolution in terms a non-payroll person can repeat to their customer.

• Build the process, not just work the queue. We expect the person in this role to write down how these cases get solved, then help us automate the repeatable parts.

What we're looking for:

• Several years doing corrections, amendments, and notice resolution at a payroll provider — a bureau, a PEO, or a payroll software company. This is the hard requirement. In-house payroll experience at a single employer, however deep, doesn't produce the pattern recognition this job needs.

• Real fluency across the range: multi-state and multi-jurisdiction, SUI rate changes and retroactive rate corrections, local taxes, agency registrations gone wrong, prior-quarter and prior-year amendments.

• The ability to hold a whole broken sequence in your head — how a Q1 omission shows up as a Q3 notice, a wrong W-2, and a reconciliation break, and which thread to pull first.

• Genuine curiosity about AI and about designing new processes. We're actively rebuilding how this work gets done, and we want someone who'll reach for a tool or a script before they reach for a spreadsheet, and who wants a hand in what we build.

• Clear writing. Most of what you resolve, you'll have to explain to a partner who isn't a payroll expert.

Nice to have: CPP or FPC; Canadian payroll exposure; experience with MasterTax or similar; time at a company that owned its own tax engine rather than reselling someone else's.
A note on what makes this different: we built our own rails, so when you find a systemic cause, it's ours to fix and we can actually fix it. You won't be filing a ticket into a vendor black box.