Jitjatjo × Compass Group
Pay rules in the platform, and the tool that proved they held
What was going on.Jitjatjo, an on-demand workforce platform, had signed a $35M agreement with Compass Group, the world’s largest foodservice contractor. The product was built for one tenant at a time. Compass had a 300-person payroll team on SAP and no patience for a startup’s pitch. I handled product, solution architecture and the enterprise account, reporting to the Head of Product.
What I found.The service ran across six stages: onboarding, booking, fulfillment, service delivery, reconciliation, payments. The real question was ownership. Which stages would the platform run, which would Compass keep, and which would we share? Payroll stayed with Compass. Onboarding and reconciliation were shared. And the rules that decided pay (overtime, breaks, rounding, state by state) lived in people’s heads and spreadsheets.
What I did.Mapped the six stages with Compass’s teams and settled the ownership split before anyone wrote code. Designed Sync with engineering: one internal API every product calls with an organization ID, routed to each client’s systems. It replaced the per-client batch jobs that couldn’t scale to the next enterprise client. Wrote the pay rules into the platform as a decision table: each rule with its compliance status (approved or drafted), its state, its earnings code, its logic and a worked example. Specified the payroll audit tool that let Compass’s admins create test cases and prove the rules held. Wrote UAT before the build, as the spec, signed off by the Head of Product. When Compass’s manual adjustments started producing overtime, worked with the AI team to tune the shift matcher against it.
What came out of it.A working Alpha in eight weeks. Enterprise onboarding from six months to one. Revenue up 186% through COVID. The pilot cut Compass’s labor cost 17% at 99% worker satisfaction. Sync took the platform from 10K to 250K addressable workers. Jitjatjo raised a Series B in 2023 and is now part of Dayforce.
What I took from it.Rules written into the system, a seam every product goes through, and an audit tool that scores the rules against real cases: that’s a harness with evals, built in 2020 without the vocabulary. The pattern is older than the tooling.