Incentive Compensation Systems Manager

Who you are

• Professional Experience: 5+ years of experience in incentive compensation, sales operations, revenue operations, or a related systems/process improvement role. Experience in a fast-paced technology or SaaS business is highly preferred
• Process Improvement Mindset: A demonstrated track record of finding manual, broken, or inefficient processes and systematizing them, not just documenting problems but building the solution
• SQL & Data Fluency: Hands-on SQL experience and comfort querying and reconciling data across systems to diagnose process gaps and validate automated outputs
• Automation & Tooling: Hands-on experience building automated workflows using tools such as scripting, workflow/RPA platforms, or ICM systems (e.g., Xactly, CaptivateIQ, Varicent, SPIFF platforms). Comfort standing up lightweight tools or integrations when off-the-shelf options fall short
• Systems Fluency: Familiarity with the core systems that touch incentive compensation: CRM (e.g., Salesforce), HRIS, data warehouses (e.g., BigQuery), and comp management platforms (e.g., Xactly) understanding how data moves between them
• Cross-Functional Communication: Strong communication skills, with the ability to sit with a team, understand how they actually work day-to-day, and translate that into clear systems requirements and process changes
• Analytical Rigor: Understanding of core comp mechanics (quotas, accelerators, SPIFFs, payout timing) sufficient to spot where a process breaks down or introduces risk
• Industry & Scale Context: Experience working in a high-growth SaaS, cloud, or open-source company, particularly within a public company or an environment undergoing IPO readiness
• Global Collaboration: Proven success working within globally distributed, remote-first organizations across multiple time zones
• AI & LLM-Driven Automation: Experience documenting datasets and workflows for Model Context Protocol (MCP) server ingestion, or building AI skills/agents to automate incentive compensation data discovery, exception detection, or reporting

What the job involves

• We are looking for an Incentive Compensation Systems Manager to join our Incentive Compensation (IC) team and drive the systemization, automation, and continuous improvement of our commission operations
• This is a high-impact, individual contributor role with end-to-end ownership, reporting to the Senior Manager, Incentive Compensation
• To be successful, you should look forward to operating in an unstructured, fast-paced, remote-first environment where you will identify gaps in existing processes, replace manual workarounds with scalable systems, and bring greater predictability, accuracy, and speed to how the business manages commissions, quotas, and comp plan administration
• In this role, you will gain deep exposure to how incentive compensation data flows end-to-end from our CRM (e.g., SFDC), People systems (e.g., Workday) through calculation engines (e.g., Xactly) to payout and reporting (e.g., BigQuery)
• You'll be the person the team turns to when a process is slow, fragile, or held together by spreadsheets
• You will partner closely with our Incentive Compensation Operations Team, Finance & Strategy, People Ops, and RevOps orgs to understand how work actually gets done today, find the friction points, and build the tooling and workflows that remove them
• This role requires a unique balance: enough technical depth to design and build real automation, combined with the process discipline and cross-functional judgment to know which problems are worth solving first
• Process & Gap Assessment: Embed with the IC team to map current-state workflows across plan administration, calculation, approvals, and payout. Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone steps and prioritize them based on risk, time cost, and business impact
• Systematization & Automation: Design and build automated workflows, integrations, and tooling that replace manual processes from data pulls and reconciliations to approval routing and exception handling. Reduce reliance on ad-hoc spreadsheets and one-off scripts in favor of durable, repeatable systems
• Xactly ICM Ownership: Serve as a hands-on owner of our Xactly instances (e.g., Incent and Connect) configuring calculation rules, plan logic, and workflows, and continuously tuning the platform so it does more of the heavy lifting currently done manually outside the system
• AI-Enabled Process Automation: Identify where AI tools and LLM-driven agents can take over manual, repetitive Incentive Compensation work such as exception detection, data reconciliation, plan document review, or answering common comp questions and build the workflows/integrations to put them into production
• Systems Integration: Partner with IC, Finance & Strategy, People Ops, Revenue Operations, and IT/Data teams to ensure incentive compensation systems are properly integrated, with clean, reliable data flowing between them
• Documentation & Governance: Establish clear documentation, standard operating procedures, and controls for newly systematized processes, so they're auditable, maintainable, and don't regress back into manual work over time
• Continuous Improvement Cadence: Set up a repeatable process for the IC team to keep identifying and retiring manual work, as an ongoing discipline of finding the next bottleneck and fixing it
• Cross-Functional Enablement: Act as the go-to resource translating IC process needs into system requirements, and translating system/data constraints back into practical process recommendations the team can act on
• Operational Excellence: Support urgent, ad-hoc requests during payout cycles while keeping an eye on the long-term goal. Building yourself out of the fire-fighting role by systemizing the fixes

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists