Founding Engineer (Applied AI)
Location:
On-site (SF)
Type :
Full Time
Overview
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. You’ll work closely with both ML engineers and tax operations to ship features that directly improve speed, accuracy, and reliability for our customers.
What You'll Build
Vision-Language pipelines that process and extract structured data from unstructured client tax documents.
Highly reliable extraction pipelines that combine AI models, deterministic rules, and human-in-the-loop corrections.
Prompting systems and model fine-tuning pipelines to improve accuracy on complex tax forms, handwritten notes, brokerage statements, and K-1s.
Distributed cloud infrastructure to process thousands of client files concurrently across multiple firms and tax seasons.
Integrations with major tax software systems, file portals, and document management tools.
Direct collaboration with tax professionals and end users to identify pain points, prototype solutions, and ship features that create real leverage.
Qualifications
Shipped products that leverage LLMs, vision models, or document extraction systems in production environments.
Comfortable working with transformer models, prompt engineering, and eval pipelines for reliability.
2+ years of experience with backend, data, and infra; strong proficiency in Python.
Thrive in ambiguous environments with high ownership and a builder mentality.
Bonus: experience with browser automation tools like Playwright, Selenium, or RPA frameworks.
Bonus: experience with MLOps, fine-tuning, or ML research.
What We Offer
We’re building AI co-workers that eliminate repetitive data entry and document processing in tax preparation. Right now, we’re riding a wave of customer interest looking to make a foundational hire to help handle our growth. Here’s why you should join us:
Pushing frontier tech every day
We’re solving some of the hardest challenges in vision-language models, document understanding, and structured data extraction for complex financial workflows.
Right Market Opportunity
The tax industry is facing a major capacity crunch: 50,000+ CPA shortage, an aging workforce, and growing client demand. Firms are increasingly bottlenecked by the volume of manual prep and data entry.
Demand Outpacing Supply
We’ve grown fast on the back of strong customer pull, real-world performance, and word-of-mouth. Our system is saving firms hundreds of hours per season while fitting directly into existing tax software workflows.
World-class team and advisors
Our team includes experts in machine learning, tax preparation, and workflow automation, with backgrounds across AI infrastructure, SaaS, and tax operations. We’re backed by investors & advisors who have built leading products in both tax and enterprise software, as well as Y Combinator.
Competitive salary and meaningful equity
You will be the first hire period and will get to shape and build the product at a breakneck pace
Access to cutting-edge technologies and learning resources.
A supportive team culture focused on collaboration and innovation.
Friendly, in-person culture in the heart of SF
