HR Operations and Payroll Regional Leader

Wabtec Corporation is a leading global provider of equipment, systems, digital solutions and value-added services for freight and transit rail. Drawing on nearly four centuries of collective experience across Wabtec, GE Transportation and Faiveley Transport, the company has unmatched digital expertise, technological innovation, and world-class manufacturing and services, enabling the digital-rail-and-transit ecosystems. Wabtec is focused on performance that drives progress, creating transportation solutions that move and improve the world. Wabtec has approximately 27,000 employees in facilities throughout the world. Visit the company’s new website at:

It’s not just about your careeror your job title it’s about who you are and the impact you are going to make on the world. Do you want to go into uncharted waters do things that haven’t been done to make yours and someone else's life better? Wabtec has been doing that for decades and we will continue to do so Through our people, leadership development, services, technology and scale, Wabtec delivers better outcomes for global customers by speaking the language of industry.

The HR Operations and Payroll Regional Leader is part of the HR Shared Services Team. The role leads an organization of professionals and vendors to deliver regional HR transactional and process support for the employee lifecycle and payroll. Additionally, the Regional Leader leads and delivers enhancements to employee experience through process and system enhancements, transformation, and implementations. The Regional Leader manages team delivery of operational and system support to the Region and works collaboratively with other Centers of Expertise (Talent Acquisition, HRIS, Comp & Benefits, Legal) to design and deliver HR business processes.

Main Responsibilities:

- Lead and manage people and processes essential to the employee lifecycle and payroll for Brazil and Chile.
- Oversee the organizations payroll function, ensuring pay is processed on time, accurately, and in compliance with government regulations.
- Manage, develop, and engage a high-performing regional team; build functional and leadership capability within the team and bench-strength for future needs; deploy resources to fit business needs.
- Develop strategic partnerships with local HR to evaluate and evolve relationship in the region and ensure performance in accordance with SLAs. Lead quarterly service reviews.
- Partner with regional stakeholders to identify regional projects and process improvements; prioritize, plan, scope out projects and work with team to implement.
- Serve as a point of escalation for service issue themes, identifying root cause and path to resolution to ensure continued service improvement.
- Lead team projects regionally and/or globally to evolve HR processes that span across the employee life-cycle; drive process improvements and standardization in partnership with Continuous Improvement Team.
- Provide support to cross-functional workstreams in the region, such as Acquisitions, Reorganizations, Legal Entity Changes.
- Ensure local processes are documented thoroughly and team understands processes fully. Communicate and provide change management to team and HR community when changes are implemented.
- Monitor best practices, industry standards, local requirements; implement changes to internal processes as needed.

Required Qualifications:

- Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business, Accounting, Information Systems, or relevant field. Equivalent work experience in a similar position may be substituted for education requirements.
- Substantial experience in Human Resources, preferably in a Shared Services environment.
- Proven experience with HR administration, payroll, and systems within a large, complex enterprise, ideally across a range of geographies and businesses.
- Experience identifying areas for continuous improvement and managing CI projects.
- Strong experience working within HR systems, preferably Workday. Experience with a ticketing system such as ServiceNow.
- Team management and development.
- Proficient with Microsoft Office Suite with intermediate Excel skills (pivot tables & charts, vlookups).
- Fluent in Portuguese and English.
- Competencies:_
- Excellent communication skills, with ability to motivate and influence without direct authority.
- Strong customer-focus; ability to build and maintain effective relationships with customers.
- Ability to operate autonomously and make quality decisions within ambiguous situations.
- Continuous-improvement mindset and enthusiasm for problem-solving and improving customer experience.
- Ability to create focus for self and team through rigorous prioritization of activities.
- Comfortable presenting to stakeholders, business leaders, and HR community. Able to analyze data, draw business insights, and present to stakeholders in a meaningful way.
- Ability to have fun and maintain a sense of humor.

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