Software Engineer (Applied AI)
Software Engineer (Applied AI)
At Column Tax, we’re building the next generation of tax software. Our mission is to make it possible for every taxpayer to file confidently in just one click. As the fastest-growing tax e-filer of all time, we’ve already helped millions of Americans. Come help us build delightful, transparent, and easy-to-use tax products — and bring that experience to many, many millions more!
What we are looking for at Column Tax
Improvise, adapt, overcome. We’re a startup — everyone jumps in across teams to solve problems and create forward motion.
Empathy, communication, and teamwork. Tax software isn’t a solo effort. You’ll collaborate closely with engineers, tax analysts, designers, and GTM on nearly every project.
Ownership mindset. Everyone shapes the product and engineering roadmap
Fierce execution. We focus week to week, to deliver real value to taxpayers and partners.
What we are looking for in the role
4-6+ years of professional experience in software engineering or a related role.
Experience exploring, developing, and implementing advanced AI technologies into shipped software such as our AI tax development agent.
Experience building and deploying reinforcement learning algorithms and machine learning pipelines.
Track record of taking full ownership of projects from spec to ship to scale.
Regularly takes on work beyond their current comfort zone, learning new languages, systems, or domains in order to deliver real value.
Comfortable working and reasoning across the stack whether frontend, backend, or infrastructure.
Bonus points for experience in tax, bookkeeping, embedded fintech.
Bonus points for a blend of startup scrappiness and working in high-scale systems.
Based in San Francisco 🌉 / New York City🗽, and excited to be in-office at least 3 days a week. If you're not local but are open to relocating, let us know!
Day-to-day
Build agentic tooling that is able to understand tax law turn it into software code, and test itself to achieve correctness.
Ingest and process millions of data points from uploaded documents, partner integrations, and external APIs to accurately auto-fill tax returns so taxpayers don’t have to.
Build and extend our APIs for our partners - Our partners are key to our success. We empower our partners by creating APIs that make integration seamless and intuitive.
Create UI for our embedded tax platform - Work with Design and the Tax teams to translate complicated tax code into a delightful UI that anyone can use.
Week-to-week
Week 1: Meet the team, ship to prod on day one, fix 1–2 bugs to get acclimated.
Month 1: Lead and ship a small feature, review PRs, and demo at all-hands.
Month 3: Own a larger project, help scope future work, mentor teammates, and lead process improvements.
Interview Process
Step 1: Intro call with our Head of Engineering (or a team member)
This is a two-way conversation. We’ll talk about your background, what you’re looking for next, and the kinds of problems you enjoy solving. You’ll also get a chance to learn more about Column — how we work, what we value, and how we’d support you if you joined. Bring questions!
Step 2: Take home challenge
We’ll ask you to complete a ~3-hour project that mirrors the kind of integration or tooling work we do every day. You’ll have full freedom to do it your way — this is about decision-making, clarity, and implementation, not code golf.
Step 3: Interview panels
The interview panels are where you’ll meet several of us and work through collaborative challenges. The interviews are designed to mimic real work — like redesigning a creaky system, debugging in a sandboxed environment, and walking through a past project. The interview panels are over video calls and ~4.5 hours total over two days.
Step 4: Offer
Before making a formal offer, we like to speak with a few people you’ve worked closely with — usually a manager or peer. It helps us understand how to support you best. If all looks good, we’ll move quickly to extend an offer and kick off what we hope is a long, rewarding partnership.
How to apply
At Column Tax, we’re committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace. If this sounds exciting — even if you’re not sure you meet every requirement — we hope you’ll apply. We’re looking for people, not checkboxes.
Email us at hiring@columntax.com with your LinkedIn/GitHub or apply here: