Professional tax software runs on deterministic engines that translate millions of tax rules into calculations. The engines powering most professional tax returns were built decades ago.\
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Luca IQ is building the modern replacement: a tax engine and the application tax professionals use to prepare, calculate, and file real returns with the IRS.
We’re a small engineering team building a new tax platform. This is a frontend-focused role: you’ll primarily own that application, while collaborating closely with engineers working on the calculation engine and APIs around it. As an early-stage startup, you’ll also help shape our product, engineering practices, and the technical decisions that matter most.
### The Team
Luca IQ was founded by Angelo Policicchio, a CPA, and Akash Sadashivapeth, who met at Harvard Business School. Our engineering team brings decades of combined experience building deterministic engines for the financial services industry, where accuracy is non-negotiable. We’re building Luca IQ because nearly every tax return prepared by a CPA in America runs through one of a handful of tax engines built in the 1990s, and we’re building the first modern, API-first, IRS-approved engine to replace them.
### What You’ll Work On
**The application layer:** Build and evolve a complex React application for preparing returns, including thousands of taxpayer inputs, validation layers, state dependencies, and day-to-day workflow.
**Frontend architecture:** Make a large, data-dense product fast, reliable, maintainable, and understandable as it grows.
**Product and platform collaboration:** Partner with backend engineers to shape API contracts and help ensure the product accurately reflects the calculation engine.
### What Success Looks Like
**In your first 30 days,** you’ll learn the return-preparation workflow, ship production improvements, and develop a clear view of the frontend’s most important technical constraints.
**By 60 days,** you’ll lead a meaningful improvement to a high-complexity workflow, making it more reliable, easier to maintain, or more usable for tax professionals for this upcoming tax season.
**By 90 days,** you’ll own all of the frontend architecture and help set the technical direction for how the product scales.
### What We’re Looking For
* Deep experience building production React and TypeScript applications.
* Experience building data-dense, form-heavy interfaces at scale, including large repeating field sets, complex validation, or state that remains reliable across hundreds of controls.
* Strong frontend architecture judgment around client state, validation, performance, testing, and maintainability.
* Careful reasoning about systems with extensive dependencies, edge cases, and state.
* A bias toward shipping: you want to get real work in front of customers, learn, and iterate while treating accuracy, validation, and auditability as non-negotiable.
### How We Work
We’re a small team with high ownership and little separation between product and engineering. You’ll ship production code in your first few weeks, speak directly with the people using what you build, work through difficult technical and product decisions with the team, and own meaningful parts of a new tax platform’s frontend architecture.
Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
