Tax Pilot · Salt Lake City ·
Full-stack engineer at an early-stage startup building an AI-native payroll tax compliance platform: AI agents that ingest tax documents, automate reconciliation and filing, and orchestrate work using LLM techniques (retrieval, tool use, structured outputs) integrated with payroll APIs, tax engines, and ERPs.
Workstream · Lehi, Utah, United States
M-Files · United States
epay-policy · Austin, TX
Bristlecone Companies · United States
Compensation: $55k – $135k
Every year, an estimated $85 billion is spent on human payroll tax compliance work that AI can now automate.
More than a million people sit inside payroll bureaus, PEOs, and enterprise tax departments processing notices, filing returns, registering EINs, reconciling agency payments, and managing compliance workflows. EY benchmarks roughly 60% of that work as automatable with current technology. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is already projecting this workforce to shrink because of automation.
The market is still dominated by legacy platforms: MasterTax, Asure PTM, and ADP SmartCompliance.
These systems run the market, but they have not meaningfully changed in two decades. They are filing systems built before real-time data, before LLMs, and before customers expected software to solve problems instead of simply tracking them.
They cannot rebuild from the ground up without dismantling the headcount-heavy business models that fund them.
None of them are building agents. Their architecture predates the technology. Their business models depend on the headcount we are displacing. Their customers are openly asking for a way out.
This is a David and Goliath setup.
We are a small team going after billion-dollar incumbents that cannot fight back without dismantling their own business models. We are operating in a market with $7 billion in annual IRS penalties and a workforce the federal government is already projecting to contract.
Our advantages are unfair.
Our Head of Tax has 30 years of payroll tax practice, and her reasoning is the training data behind our agents. That data set cannot be licensed or bought. Every notice the agents resolve makes them smarter, and the moat compounds.
We already have 11 paying advisory customers generating six-figure ARR and live access to production data inside a payroll company. We are not theorizing about workflows. We are automating ours and selling the result.
Nine out of ten conversations we have with bureaus and employers turn into an opportunity.
Not because we are good at sales.
Because the problem is universal, painful, and nothing on the market truly solves it.
Our founders have spent 40+ years inside the payroll industry and have built and sold two prior payroll companies.
They know exactly which workflows break, which agencies are slow, which notices cost the most to resolve, and what good looks like.
Our CTO is an engineering leader with deep product instincts who is building the agentic platform alongside the founding engineer.
Our Head of Tax is the operating partner whose three decades of expert reasoning are the foundation of every agent we ship.
You will help build the AI-native payroll tax compliance platform replacing legacy, headcount-heavy workflows.
This includes:
This is not another AI wrapper.
We are building inside the workflows, with real customers, real production data, and real tax experts shaping the system.
The incumbents own the old rails. We are building the autonomous layer that makes those rails obsolete.
If you want to build agents that replace real operational work in a massive, broken, compliance-heavy market, this is the place to do it.
Clarivate · USA - Philadelphia, PA