Senior Software Engineer

About Avalon Tax

Avalon Tax is an AI tax-prep automation startup built by tax professionals. Our desktop app reads clients' tax documents (W-2s, 1099s, K-1s and more) and enters the data into professional tax software (Drake, Lacerte, CCH Axcess and ProConnect), so tax firms spend their time reviewing returns instead of typing. We have paying customers and revenue, and our product runs in real tax seasons.

The Role

We're hiring a senior software engineer to take over development from the founder and own the product end to end: the Electron + React (TypeScript) desktop app, the Python (FastAPI) document-extraction backend, the Node.js + PostgreSQL cloud backend, and the Windows and browser automation bots that enter data into each tax program. AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) are a core part of how we build, so you'll direct them and review their work as much as you write code yourself.

What You'll Do

• Own the reliability, performance and security of the desktop app, extraction pipeline and cloud backend
• Ship features end to end, from document extraction to automated data entry in Drake, Lacerte, CCH Axcess and ProConnect
• Troubleshoot customer issues, fix root causes and add regression tests
• Review and integrate code from people and AI agents, and raise the bar on testing, CI and releases
• Keep taxpayer data safe with a local-first design, strong authentication and secure defaults

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of professional software engineering, including owning production systems that customers depend on
• Strong in at least two of Python, TypeScript/React and Node.js, plus PostgreSQL and REST APIs
• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or similar), with a critical eye on their output
• A security mindset: you treat sensitive taxpayer data as a design constraint
• Strong debugging across desktop, cloud, third-party APIs and Windows-specific behavior

Nice to Have

• Experience at a tax or accounting software company (Intuit, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer/CCH, Drake, TaxAct, K1x or similar)
• Electron or desktop app experience
• Windows desktop or browser automation (pywinauto, Playwright)
• Document extraction, OCR or LLM pipeline experience
• Early-stage startup experience

Location

Hybrid from our office in Chatham, NJ if you live in New Jersey. Remote anywhere in the US otherwise. US work authorization required; we can't sponsor visas.

Compensation

$135,000-$175,000 base salary plus 0.75%-1.25% equity in stock options (4-year vesting, 1-year cliff).