Founding Engineer

The space

$85 billion gets paid every year to humans doing payroll tax compliance work AI can now do. Over a million people sit inside payroll bureaus, PEOs, and enterprise tax departments processing notices, filing returns, registering EINs, and reconciling agency payments. EY benchmarks 60% of that work as automatable with current technology. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is already projecting the workforce to shrink because of it.

MasterTax. Asure PTM. ADP Smart Compliance. Three platforms running the entire market, and none of them have meaningfully changed in two decades. They are filing systems built before real-time data, before LLMs, and before customers expected software to actually solve problems instead of just tracking them. They cannot rebuild without dismantling the headcount-heavy business models that fund them.

None of them are building agents. Their architecture predates the technology. Their business models depend on the headcount we are displacing. Their customers are openly asking for a way out.

Why you should join us

This is a David and Goliath setup. We are a small team going after billion-dollar incumbents who cannot fight back without dismantling their own business models, in a market with $7B in annual IRS penalties and a workforce the federal government is already projecting to contract.

Our advantages are unfair. Our head of tax has 30 years of payroll tax practice, and her reasoning is the training data behind our agents. That data set cannot be licensed or bought. Every notice the agents resolve makes them smarter, and the moat compounds. We have 11 paying advisory customers generating six-figure ARR and live access to production data inside a payroll company. We are not theorizing about workflows. We are automating ours and selling the result.

Nine out of ten conversations we have with bureaus and employers turn into an opportunity. Not because we are good at sales. Because the problem is universal and nothing on the market solves it.

The team

Our founders have spent 40+ years inside this industry and built and sold two prior payroll companies. They know exactly which workflows break, which agencies are slow, which notices cost the most to resolve, and what good looks like. The CTO is an engineering leader with deep product instincts who is building the agentic platform alongside the founding engineer. The head of tax is the operating partner whose three decades of expert reasoning are the foundation of every agent we ship.

We will share more about the team in person.

What you'll do

This is not a typical engineering job. You will own production agents end to end. Systems that resolve real IRS and state agency notices for real clients with real money on the line. You will define the scope, design the system, ship it, and own the outcome.

In the first six months you will build:

• Notice Agent - the highest-volume workflow in the industry: intake, extraction, reconciliation, response drafting, resolution tracking
• Registration Agent - a brain that tracks multi-state obligations and identifies required documents, plus hands using Computer Use to navigate state portals and submit forms
• Audit Defense Agent - IRS and state audit responses with timeline tracking, documentation assembly, and senior review gates
• Intake Router and orchestration layer - the classifier that decides what goes where, plus the case infrastructure, evidence tables, and approval policies every action runs through
• Evals and reliability - probabilistic systems doing deterministic work; how we measure whether an agent is performing at the level of an experienced tax professional, and how we catch it when it is not

Stack: TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, Bedrock, LLM APIs, agent orchestration, Computer Use, SST.

Who you are

• You've shipped production systems end to end and can defend every decision in them
• You use AI as a core part of how you work. Not because everyone does, but because you've figured out how to use it to do things that would otherwise take a team
• You move fast and care about getting it right. Payroll tax has no room for hand-wave correctness. The job is both
• You don't need perfect requirements to start building
• You want ownership of the codebase, the outcome, and what this becomes
• You want to work very hard

We are hiring for hunger and AI depth, not pedigree. The two profiles we expect to fit: a startup engineer who has shipped real agentic systems and wants more ownership on the next one, or a new grad who has lived inside LLMs since they were released and has the projects to prove it. Utah or Southern California preferred so we can work together in person. Remote on the table for the right person.

Why this is the right career moment

Payroll tax compliance is one of the largest operational industries still run on software built before the modern web, let alone modern AI. The incumbents cannot rebuild without dismantling their own business models. Their customers are looking for a way out. The technology to do this has existed for about 18 months.

This window does not stay open forever. The team that captures it will be the one that gets the first agents into production with real clients and lets the moat compound. Engineers who join Tax Pilot now will build something that has never existed inside an industry that has never been seriously challenged. You will have a story for your career that is genuinely distinctive: you helped automate one of the largest operational categories in American business at the moment it first became possible.