Magnetic is hiring a skilled Software Engineer to join our core development team. You’ll be responsible for building and maintaining the backend systems that power our AI-driven tax prep platform — including model pipelines, data extraction logic, and integrations with tax software, as well as improving our client-facing touchpoints. You’ll work closely with engineering, product, and tax operations to ship features that directly improve speed, accuracy, and reliability for our customers.
What You'll Build
Magnetic 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.
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.
We've built this kind of software before, we've worked together for years (and even lived together), we've built products to $10M ARR before, and we have the grit to outwork anyone in this space.
Salary
$200,000 - $250,000
Equity
1% - 3%
Location
San Francisco, CA, US
Experience
3+ years
Investors
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.