Founding Tax Expert

Magnetic is building AI-powered tax prep for professionals. Our product scans, classifies, and populates client tax documents directly into professional tax software. That means CPAs and EAs can handle more returns, more accurately, and with far less manual work.

We’re a small, fast-moving team backed by Y Combinator (S25). Early firms are already using our system in production and replacing hours of grunt work every day. Now we’re looking for a founding tax expert to help us scale.

This is a rare opportunity to use your tax experience to help build real automation at a cutting-edge startup.

You’ll be the first tax expert on the team. Your job is to make sure we’re preparing high-quality returns, managing a growing review team, and turning your knowledge into process and product. Over time, you’ll help build the tools that automate your own work.

Responsibilities include:

• Prepare and review complex 1040 returns, including high-income, multi-state, and investment-heavy clients

• Manage and train a team of preparers and reviewers

• Build internal processes that improve accuracy, speed, and scale

• Work directly with engineers to translate tax workflows into automation logic

• You’re a licensed CPA or EA

• You’ve prepared and reviewed 1040s for at least five years

• You know one of the major tax software platforms (UltraTax, Drake, Lacerte, ProSeries) inside and out

• You’re comfortable with complex returns, including K-1s, state credits, and brokerage statements

• You’ve managed or trained junior staff before

• You care about accuracy but also know how to move fast

• You’re excited about technology and want to help build the future of tax

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity

• Ground-floor role on a venture-backed team

• Direct impact on product and process

• Flexible work setup (remote ok)

• Opportunity to shape how modern tax prep works

Magnetic is building an AI tax preparer for CPA firms. Our software scans client documents - from handwritten charity notes to excel spreadsheet Schedule Cs to multi-state K-1s - and enters them into tax software automatically, saving hours of tedious data entry.

The accounting profession is facing a massive talent shortage, as graduates choose different professions and the old guard begins to retire. As a result, CPA and tax preparation firms are awash in clientele, but unable to keep up. At many firms, phones go unanswered, clients are "fired", and websites are taken down, as the existing workforce tries to handle the grueling 80 hour+ weeks necessary to push through tax season to the April 15th deadline.

We built this because a former colleague who owns her own tax firm asked us to automate her workload, and we quickly realized the massive opportunity. Thomas brings deep domain expertise as the former Head of Product at Keeper (YC W19), where he built tax engine automation systems and an OCR form scanning system that outperformed everything else on the market. At Keeper, he leveraged early access to OpenAI's LLMs (well before ChatGPT) to build systems that automated the entire tax filing process, allowing a tiny team of CPAs to process thousands of returns with near zero busy work. Patrick was the first engineer at FunCraft, shipping multiple mobile games with 1M+ downloads and building scalable shared codebases. We've worked together since 2017, including co-leading multiple teams at Zynga as PM & Tech Lead respectively.

We launched publicly in 2025 and have quickly grown to hundreds of thousands in ARR across many dozens of firms. We've completely automated over 25% of the return process so far and developed a proprietary vision model that beats incumbent scanning technology by almost 2x on accuracy. We raised $5.2M from top investors and are quickly growing our team in San Francisco.

The opportunity is massive - there are 80M US personal tax returns filed via professionals annually, in a $2B outsourcing market where individual CPA firms currently pay $100k-$1M per year for inferior services. We're positioned to capture significant market share by offering better accuracy & document coverage, instant processing, and superior user experience.