Head of Tax

Location: New York Workplace: OnSite ABOUT ARCA Arca is a wealth management firm built from the ground up with AI. Most people get financial advice that's reactive: an annual check-in, a plan that's a document instead of a living thing, a relationship where you're one of three hundred clients your advisor is trying to remember. We think that's backwards. The kind of service that used to require a team of specialists behind you, the kind that makes you feel like the only person in the room, should be available to far more than the ultra-wealthy. So we're building it. We're not SaaS — we are the wealth management business, rebuilding it from the inside with AI. Our platform is an Iron Man suit for advisors: it takes over the low-leverage work so they can focus on what actually requires a human, showing up with empathy, context, and judgment. Underneath, it keeps a living understanding of each client. It remembers the thing you mentioned once, six months ago. It notices when your life changes — a new job, a new kid, a market shift — and adjusts before you think to ask. You won't see the technology. You'll just notice your advisor seems to know you better than any financial professional ever has. That's the product we're growing: client by client, on the strength of the experience itself. We started by acquiring firms managing over $1B in client assets, which gave us real advisors, real clients, and real financial outcomes to build against from day one. But acquisition was the starting line. The bet is that an advisor backed by this platform delivers something good enough that clients come to us on their own. It's a $20T market, and we think it's ready to be rebuilt. — Rron, CEO   THE RECEIPTS - Stage: Series A, $64M raised - Backed by: General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Venrock - Board & Advisors: Former CEO of Vanguard, Former CFO of Schwab, Founder of Altruist, Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money), Will Guidara (former co-owner of Eleven Madison Park and author of Unreasonable Hospitality)   THE TEAM We’re small on purpose and engineering heavy: about 80% of the team is technical. We’re based in NYC and hail from high growth startups like Stripe, Ramp, Rippling, Plaid, Doordash, and Glean. We’re fully in-office in Flatiron, five days a week—lunch together, coffee breaks, basketball games, happy hours.   THE ROLE As Arca's Head of Tax, you'll build our tax practice from zero — the first tax hire, with a blank page and a mandate to make tax a proactive part of clients' financial life. Tax is where most of our clients feel the most friction, feel the most uncertain, and get the least help. A scramble for documents every spring, a preparer who sees one year at a time, and a wealth advisor who's never quite looped in. We think tax should be continuous, coordinated with the rest of the plan, and done ahead of the deadline instead of after it. You're here to build an AI-native tax practice from day one including the document gathering process, return preparation and review, client projection/planning before a client thinks to ask, and more. You'll design what the agents do, where a professional's judgment has to step in, and ensure end-to-end quality. This is a hands-on role involving return preparation, directly helping clients on their most complex situations, partner closely with our wealth advisors so tax and investment advice move as one, and own the service as a business: pricing, revenue, capacity, and the team you'll hire behind you. Most of your time goes to two things: doing the tax work and designing the platform that does it better, sitting next to the engineers who build it.   WHAT YOU’LL OWN - The tax practice. What we offer — starting with individual returns (1040s) and year-round planning, projections, and notices, and expanding to business returns (S-corps and other entity returns) for clients who own businesses — who it's for, and the standard every engagement is held to. You set the scope, the service model, the quality bar as well as selecting vendors (core tax return software in particular) to enable the business. - An AI-native tax process. End-to-end design of how tax work gets done at Arca — document collection, data normalization, preparation, review, filing, and post-filing. You'll work side by side with engineering and product to build it, and be the domain authority on every workflow. - Clients. You prepare, review, and own returns for clients whose situations take real expertise: stock options and RSUs, business income, S-corp owners, rental real estate, and multi-state filings. You explain tax in plain English and give clients confidence their needs are handled. - Partnership with our wealth advisors. Tax and investment advice as one plan, not two silos. You work with advisors on tax-loss harvesting, Roth conversions, charitable strategy, equity comp exercise timing, and withholding and estimated payments — and build the playbooks so advisors know when to bring you in. - Risk, compliance, and quality. Preparer standards, Circular 230 obligations, data security, engagement letters, review protocols, and an audit trail for every AI-assisted step. - The team. Hiring the preparers, reviewers, and specialists who come after you, and deciding which work we keep in-house versus partner on.   EXAMPLE PROBLEMS YOU’D WORK ON These are the kinds of questions the first year of this practice has to answer. - Tax season without the scramble. We already manage client accounts and know most of their financial picture. What does it take to have 80% of a return assembled before a client uploads a single document — and how do agents chase the remaining 20% seamlessly? - Where the agent stops and the professional starts. An agent can reconcile a 1099-B in seconds. It probably shouldn't be the one deciding how to treat a messy ISO disqualifying disposition. Drawing that line, and building a review layer that makes AI-prepared work more reliable than the traditional kind, is the core design problem. - Tax as a year-round signal. A client gets a bonus, sells a rental, or exercises options in July. How does the platform notice, rerun the projection, and get the right recommendation in front of the advisor while there's still time to act? - One plan, two disciplines. Every rebalance has a tax consequence, and every tax decision changes the investment plan. Designing how tax and wealth advice move together, inside one system, is what makes the model work.   THE KIND OF PERSON WHO THRIVES HERE You’re excited by ownership, ambiguity, and building things that matter. - You're a licensed tax professional. Active CPA license required, with 8–15+ years in individual and high-net-worth tax experience at a top firm, family office, or planning-focused practice. You've prepared and reviewed complex 1040s yourself and signed off on others' work. Equity compensation, rental real estate, and multi-state are familiar ground, and you're comfortable with the business returns that come with owner-clients: S-corps, partnerships, and C-corps. - You're a change agent. You've stood up a practice, introduced a new service line, or materially improved ways of operating. You take initiative, operate independently, and have driven impact and results. - You're AI-pilled. You already use AI in your work and have strong opinions on which parts of the tax process it should own. You don't need to write code; you need to know exactly what's slow, what's error-prone, and what a great system would do instead — and enjoy working next to the engineers who build it. - Clients and advisors trust you. You can sit with a client and make a complicated situation feel simple, and you see wealth advisors as partners. Experience working alongside a wealth management or RIA practice is a big plus. - You hold a high bar because of what's at stake. This is people's money, their filings, and their standing with the IRS. "Good enough" means something different when a mistake shows up as a notice in someone's mailbox. - You're someone people actually want to be in the room with. This is a small team, one office, five days a week, working on problems that don't have clean answers. Kind, direct, and low-ego, you can give candid feedback without being a jerk, and you're genuinely energized by this environment.   WHY NOW IS THE MOMENT TO JOIN This is a narrow window with unusually high leverage. - You're the first. No legacy process, no inherited tools, no one else's practice to fix. Whoever takes this on defines tax at Arca. - The clients are already here. We have real advisors and over $1B in client assets on the platform, and more firms and advisors joining. You're building a practice with demand on day one. - The platform is live. Agents already do real work for our advisors. You get to extend a working system into tax rather than wait for one to be built. - Tax is the next chapter. As Arca expands from wealth management into tax, estate planning, insurance, and beyond, tax is the first step. The patterns you set become the template for every service line after it. Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k), and more.