Founding Engineer (Applied AI)

Raw description: "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.\n\n**What You'll Build**\n\n* Vision-Language pipelines that process and extract structured data from unstructured client tax documents.\n\n* Highly reliable extraction pipelines that combine AI models, deterministic rules, and human-in-the-loop corrections.\n\n* Prompting systems and model fine-tuning pipelines to improve accuracy on complex tax forms, handwritten notes, brokerage statements, and K-1s.\n\n* Distributed cloud infrastructure to process thousands of client files concurrently across multiple firms and tax seasons.\n\n## About Magnetic\n\nMagnetic is building an AI tax preparer for CPA firms. Our software 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nWe 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.\n\nWe launched this year in the middle of tax season and quickly processed hundreds of returns, earning thousands in ARR, and since tax season we've been growing customers by >30% month-over-month. We've completely automated over 25% of the return process so far and developed a proprietary vision model that beats incumbent scanning technology by almost 2x on accuracy - jumping from 50% field-level accuracy to 89%, approaching the quality of their expensive human-verified service at 92%.\n\nThe 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.\n"