Director - Tax Change and Risk Manager

About Clear Street: 

Clear Street is modernizing the brokerage ecosystem. Founded in 2018, Clear Street is a diversified financial services firm replacing the legacy infrastructure used across capital markets.

We started from scratch by building a completely cloud-native clearing and custody system designed for today’s complex, global market. Clear Street’s proprietary prime brokerage platform adds significant efficiency to the market, while focusing on minimizing risk, redundancy, and cost for clients. Our goal is to create a single source-of-truth platform for every asset class, in every country, and in any currency.

By combining highly-skilled product and engineering talent with seasoned finance professionals, we’re building the essentials to compete in today’s fast-paced markets.

Role Summary

The Global Tax Operations team is responsible for ensuring compliance with Clear Street Group’s securities tax withholding and reporting obligations globally, including FATCA / CRS and QI / QDD operational requirements.

This role sits within the Global Tax Operations function, working closely with the Global Head of Tax Operations to develop and evolve the strategic vision and establish priorities.

The role acts as the operational process expert for tax, responsible for translating tax strategy, regulatory requirements, and business objectives into clear, implementable requirements and operational frameworks. It works in close partnership with Product, Engineering, and embedded Tax SMEs to ensure that tax requirements are accurately interpreted, appropriately designed.

This role is accountable for ensuring that tax logic, processes, controls, and reporting capabilities are correctly defined and operate as intended. The role also directs the use of a dedicated functionally aligned DevOps resource to enhance local tax reporting, monitoring, and analytics solutions in support of regulatory requirements and control effectiveness.

As a tax technical regulatory expert, working in conjunction with the Global Head of Tax Operations the role identifies regulatory developments completing impact assessments.

Key Accountabilities

Regulatory Translation & Platform Implementation

• Act as regulatory lead translating tax laws, regulatory requirements, and business needs into clear, structured requirements.
• Work jointly with Product, Engineering, and Tax SMEs to convert regulatory and business requirements into functional and operational specifications.
• Ensure tax logic, decisioning rules, and operational flows are correctly interpreted and implemented within platform builds.
• Working with Product and Engineering validate tax outcomes in pre- and post-production environments, ensuring alignment with regulatory expectations and business intent.

Product Integration & Operational Design

• Partner with Product teams across the full product lifecycle to ensure tax implications are identified early and embedded into product design.
• Define operational processes supporting tax outcomes, including workflows, exception handling, and escalation paths.
• Provide technical tax guidance on complex or non-standard transactions and product structures.
• Ensure alignment between product innovation and operational tax feasibility.

Operational Tax Controls & Risk Execution

• Working with the Head of Tax Operations, design the global Operational Tax controls and risk management framework.
• Own the implementation and day-to-day execution of the control’s framework across all business lines and jurisdictions.
• Ensure controls relating to withholding, reporting, documentation, and transaction tax determinations are operationally effective.
• Establish monitoring frameworks to detect control failures, incorrect tax outcomes, and data inconsistencies.
• Direct the development of detective and predictive monitoring capabilities to proactively identify risks and control gaps.
• Manage issue identification, escalation, and remediation processes.

Reporting, Monitoring & DevOps Enablement

• Prioritize the work of DevOps resources dedicated to tax reporting, monitoring, and analytics.
• Define requirements for local regulatory reporting and internal management reporting across jurisdictions.
• Oversee the development of:
• tax reporting solutions for local regulatory use
• detective control reporting and exception monitoring
• predictive analytics to identify emerging tax risks
• Ensure reporting outputs are accurate, scalable, and aligned with regulatory and audit requirements.
• Continuously refine reporting capabilities to improve transparency, efficiency, and control effectiveness.

Agile Delivery & Continuous Improvement

• Ensure tax requirements and reporting needs are appropriately prioritized and sequenced across development cycles.
• Continuously assess and refine tax logic, operational processes, and reporting capabilities as systems evolve.
• Drive improvements in automation, scalability, and control effectiveness while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Audit, Assurance & Control Monitoring

• Support internal and external audits including US QI Triennial external audit, regulatory reviews, and tax authority examinations as a key execution lead.
• Maintain robust evidence supporting tax determinations, system logic validation, control effectiveness, and reporting outputs.
• Coordinate control testing and ensure outputs are aligned with certification and audit requirements.
• Oversee remediation efforts, ensuring timely and effective resolution of identified issues.

Regulatory Developments & Impact Assessment

• Work closely with the Head of Tax Operations to identify and assess regulatory developments across relevant tax regimes.
• Support detailed impact assessments, translating regulatory change into system, process, control, and reporting requirements.
• Assist in prioritizing implementation of regulatory changes within agile delivery frameworks.

Data & Process Integrity

• Define requirements for data completeness, accuracy, and lineage to support tax determination, reporting, and audit.
• Ensure operational processes support consistent and traceable tax outcomes across systems and jurisdictions.
• Work with Engineering, Data, and DevOps teams to validate data inputs, transformations, and outputs meet tax requirements.

Cross-Functional Partnerships

• Product Management (requirements definition and prioritization)
• Engineering & DevOps (system build, reporting, and deployment)
• Embedded Tax SMEs (technical interpretation and validation)
• Front Office and Client Services (transaction support and issue resolution)
• Finance, Legal, Risk, Compliance, and Internal Audit (controls and assurance)
• External advisors and tax authorities (technical input and regulatory matters)

Qualifications & Experience

• 12+ years of experience in operational tax, withholding tax, or financial services tax roles.
• Deep technical expertise in:
• U.S. Chapter 3/4 withholding
• QI/QDD regimes
• FATCA, CRS, and global reporting regimes
• §871(m), transaction taxes, and digital asset taxation
• Strong experience translating regulatory requirements into operational and functional specifications.
• Experience directing technical resources (e.g., DevOps or data teams) for reporting and monitoring solutions.
• Proven experience implementing and operating control frameworks in regulated environments.

Operational & leadership skills

• Strong ability to manage competing priorities and deliver timely support in a high-volume, client-facing environment
• Strong attention to detail with a controls-oriented mindset
• Proven ability to build scalable processes and reduce manual operational effort through automation and documentation improvements
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to engage effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Experience partnering cross-functionally with Product and Technology teams to define requirements and improve platform tooling
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills.

We Offer: 

The Base Salary Range for this role is $130,000-$170,000. This range is representative of the starting base salaries for this role at Clear Street. Where a candidate falls in this range will be based on job related factors such as relevant experience, skills, and location. This range represents Base Salary only, which is just one element of Clear Street's total compensation. The range stated does not include other factors of total compensation such as bonuses or equity.

At Clear Street, we offer competitive compensation packages, company equity, 401k matching, gender neutral parental leave, and full medical, dental and vision insurance. Our belief has always been that we are better as a business when we are all together in person. As such, we are requiring employees to be in the office 4 days per week. In-office benefits include lunch stipends, fully stocked kitchens, happy hours, a great location, and amazing views.

Our top priority is our people. We’re continuously investing in a culture that promotes collaboration. We help each other through challenges and celebrate each other's successes. We believe that modern workplaces succeed by virtue of having high-performance workforces that are diverse — in ideas, in cultures, and in experiences. We put in the effort to make such a workplace a daily reality and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. #LIHYBRID