Director, Tax

Requirements and responsibilities

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What You'll Do

Stand up the tax function from foundation. You're our first dedicated tax hire, working from a clean slate with outside advisors. Set the operating model, the positions, the calendar, the tooling.
Own the multi-state nexus picture — payroll, customer, and economic nexus across our remote workforce and customer footprint. Build the registration and compliance roadmap and execute it.
Define and defend US federal tax positions — R&D credit (§41), §174, capitalized software, equity comp deductions, pre-IPO restructuring.
Build our international tax foundation. We're early in global expansion and you'll own the design from the ground up — transfer pricing model and intercompany agreements, IP location and migration, GILTI/FDII, entity structure, permanent establishment risk.
Build the sales and use tax operating model — taxability, nexus monitoring, registrations, returns, exemption certificates. Strong opinions on the right tooling.
Quarterback external tax advisors — direct, scope, and decide what stays in-house. Today: Big 4 federal compliance. You'll scope SALT, international, and transfer pricing engagements as needed.
Partner with the Director, Technical Accounting & FR on equity comp (ASC 718 / IRC 409A), business combinations (ASC 805 / §338, PPAs), capitalized software, and complex financing instruments.
When the time comes, build our first ASC 740 provision from scratch — workpapers, footnotes, disclosures, tie-outs — with the rigor an external audit and S-1 require. We're not yet running a provision; you'll stand it up as audit prep requires it.
Lay the foundation for public-company tax disclosure and SOX readiness — workflows, controls, and calendars to support 10-K / 10-Q tax footnotes.
Use AI extensively — research, memo drafting, nexus analysis, transfer pricing benchmarking, peer disclosure scraping, workflow automation — and build your own tooling where it helps.
Build the team as we scale.

What You'll Need

Active CPA, JD with tax LLM, or MST. Big 4 or national firm tax foundation.
8+ years of progressive corporate tax experience. Deep fluency in US federal and multi-state, plus hands-on international tax — transfer pricing, IP structuring, GILTI/FDII, intercompany. We're early in our international exposure and you'll be the one who builds it; experience at a company that's done this before is required.
Hands-on technical range across what'll define our audit and S-1 — federal positions including R&D credit and §174, multi-state SALT, indirect tax, equity-comp tax, ASC 740. You can take a gnarly issue and come back with a defensible position you reasoned through yourself.
Experience preparing or rebuilding tax provisions, footnotes, and disclosures from scratch — not just reviewing them.
Experience managing external auditors and tax consultants — scope, direct, push back.
Comfort vibe-coding scripts and small automations (Python, SQL, or equivalent) — for nexus monitoring, provision tie-outs, exposure modeling, pulling structured data from messy sources. Required, not optional. We're looking for a leader who'll write the scripts that replace the work, not just describe what should be automated.
A builder's instinct — comfort with ambiguity, no waiting for playbooks, strong bias to ship.
AI-native working style — you use LLMs daily and can talk concretely about what they do well and where they fall short for tax.
Strong written and verbal communication — you can translate tax for non-tax stakeholders without losing precision.

It Would Be Great If You Had

Prior experience preparing a company for its first external audit and S-1 / IPO.
Prior experience standing up an in-house tax function at a high-growth company.
SaaS or AI-business tax experience — capitalized software, sales tax for SaaS, customer-base international expansion.
Multi-state employee mobility, RSU/ISO equity-comp tax mobility, and §83(b) coordination at scale.
Working knowledge of provision tools (OneSource, Corptax, Longview), sales tax engines (Avalara, Anrok, Vertex), and research platforms — and strong opinions about them.