SOFTWARE ENGINEER (INFRASTRUCTURE)

At Column Tax, we’re building the next generation of tax software. Our mission is to make it possible for every taxpayer to file confidently in just one click. As the fastest-growing tax e-filer of all time, we’ve already helped millions of Americans. Come help us build delightful, transparent, and easy-to-use tax products — and bring that experience to many, many millions more!

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR AT COLUMN TAX

• Improvise, adapt, overcome. We’re a startup — everyone jumps in across teams to solve problems and create forward motion.
• Empathy, communication, and teamwork. Tax software isn’t a solo effort. You’ll collaborate closely with engineers, tax analysts, designers, and GTM on nearly every project.
• Ownership mindset. Everyone shapes the product and engineering roadmap.
• Fierce execution. We focus week to week, to deliver real value to taxpayers and partners.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR IN THE ROLE

• 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!

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.

INTERVIEW 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.

Email us at hiring@columntax.com with your LinkedIn/GitHub or apply here: