Software Engineer, Column Tax
Infrastructure
3 days a week in office
All-in-one income tax products
Be an early applicant
All-in-one income tax products
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
3 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To democratize access to financial help and meaningfully improve people’s lives by providing game-changing tax solutions.
Role
Who you are
- Started in application development but shifted into infrastructure over the past few years and now think in terms of systems, safety, and scale
- Have a strong thesis on how modern infrastructure should work and can explain it clearly, with tradeoffs
- Have deep working experience with a major compute provider (e.g., AWS, GCP) and can describe how a VPC, subnet, or IAM policy actually works under the hood
- Know how to structure and scale Infrastructure as Code and have opinions on composition, separation, and change management
- Have experience with operations and observability and care about what good on-call, system performance, and alerting actually look like
- Care deeply about developer experience and productivity — you design tooling, pipelines, and workflows that let engineers move fast without cutting corners
- Bring a practical security mindset — you don’t need to be an expert, but you understand risks and design defensively
- Bonus points for leading or highly involved contributor for a large cloud migration
- 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!
What the job involves
- Day-to-day
- Scale infrastructure to meet demand — tune system performance, reduce costs, and prepare our stack for the next 10x in usage
- Shape our cloud strategy — identify the best composable primitives across providers so we stay nimble, performant, and avoid lock-in where it matters
- Own cloud operations — proactively monitor system health, resolve incidents, and help define what “good” looks like for on-call and observability
- Design and implement internal infrastructure — from Terraform modules to deployment pipelines — to support both our product and tax teams
- Work cross-functionally with product engineers — to unblock feature development, debug tricky integration issues, or design infra for new products
- Improve developer workflows — speed up CI/CD, standardize local dev environments, and reduce paper cuts that slow the team down
- 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
Application 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
Our take
Year-round access to accountants and tax advisers has long been limited to the wealthy. Column Tax is a mobile income tax software platform that aims to solve this problem by giving ordinary people high-quality, year-round financial support.
Column Tax makes it easier for users to file their taxes and access their tax refunds, which will no doubt appeal to the large percentage of Americans who rely financially on rebates. The company's software differs from programs such as TurboTax in that it is mobile-only, and it integrates with users' existing banking apps. This year-round integration will save users valuable time on their annual tax preparation.
The company has raised considerable investment and expanded services to cover state tax filings atop its original federal-only offering. In continuing to expand the scope of its products and integrations, Column Tax is building a pathway to future success.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
May 2022
$21.7m
SERIES A
Nov 2021
$5.1m
SEED
Total funding: $26.8m
Company HQ
Civic Center, New York, NY
Leadership
Michael R. Bock
(Co-Founder, CTO & Product)Studied Computer Science and Business Administration at USC. Worked as a Software Engineer at YouTube, Google and Waymo. Was also a Senior Software Engineer at Aurora.
Gavin Nachbar
(Co-Founder & CEO)Majored in Mathematical Economics at Colorado College, and worked as a Sales Strategy & Operations Lead at Dropbox. Was also Head of Sales & BizOps at Premise Data, and Head of Operations Strategy at Waymo.
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