Senior Benefits Administrator

Darigold seeks a skilled and motivated Senior Benefits Administrator to join our team! The Senior Benefits Administrator serves as a strategic and operational partner in planning, administration and continuous improvement of the organization’s employee benefit offerings. Working closely with the Senior Manager – Total Rewards and cross-functional teams, this role helps drive the Total Rewards strategy by managing complex benefits programs, leading open enrollment, supporting vendor relationships and ensuring regulatory compliance across all offerings.

The Senior Benefits Administrator is responsible for the day-to-day operations of health and welfare plans, retirement programs and wellness initiatives. They analyze benefits data, identify trends, recommend enhancements and serve as subject matter expert for internal stakeholders, while also supporting strategic projects and process improvements. This is a professional role requiring independent judgement and the ability to perform complex work with minimal supervision.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in benefits support, strategy and operations, excellent analytical skills and a passion for delivering a best-in-class employee experience. This role is based at our Corporate Office in Seattle, WA.

Darigold is the fifth largest dairy cooperative in the United States based on milk volume and one of the largest privately held organizations headquartered in the state of Washington. Since 1918, our producers have taken pride in producing dairy products with unsurpassed quality. Today, we are one of the nation's largest agricultural cooperatives, producing over 8.5 billion pounds of milk every year.

Through innovative technology and our efficient, flexible production capabilities, we deliver value added products and customer-driven solutions. Darigold is now known throughout the world for bringing fresh, wholesome dairy products and ingredients from the Northwest to people all around the globe.

• Maintains Benefit Inbox and vendor sites, acting as main contact for employee's benefit administration and support. Provides superb customer service, resolving benefit inquiries from employees, HR Business Partners and vendors in a timely manner.
• Monitors UKG File Transfers for completeness, addressing and resolving errors as needed or escalating and coordinating error resolution with UKG case management, as needed. Documenting details and providing case updates to team/vendors/manager.
• Gathers employee data, processes benefit invoices and performs monthly billing and enrollment audits.
• Helps to establish and deliver the annual benefits communication strategy, including maintaining and updating the Benefits SharePoint site, creating monthly content for all locations and communications avenues in partnership with Sr. Manager – Total Rewards.
• Supports the annual open enrollment process including preparing the open enrollment module in UKG, updating UKG benefit rate tables, coordinating updates to the benefit guidebook and open enrollment communication materials, coordinating open enrollment information sessions, tracking, implementing open enrollment changes, performing open enrollment audits and scrubbing data to prepare for the new year and partnering with benefits vendors, and HR Business Partners, as needed.
• Subject Matter Expert for Darigold benefits. Keeps abreast of federal, state and local laws affecting company benefit programs. Informs, updates and maintains programs for compliance.
• Ensures awareness of collective bargaining agreement provisions to aid with benefit related matters.
• Provides input to and develops content for employee benefits communications, including, a regular cadence of promotion and education materials that support building understanding and reinforcing the value of our benefits programs.
• Collaborates with Sr. Manager – Total Rewards on wellness programming and related events including benefit fairs, financial and wellness solutions, retirement education seminars and immunization clinics.

• Facilitates annual 401k and financial audits by providing records and…