Instead
About Instead
Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.
Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com), IRIS (irisglobal.com) the largest tax software provider in the UK and many of our partners and customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.
Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.
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About Instead
Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes and file tax returns. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.
Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com) and many of our customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Bloomberg — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.
Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.
What You'll Do
- Own and manage our AWS infrastructure across environments (staging, production, internal tools) for a high-availability tax platform
- Design, implement, and maintain secure, scalable cloud architectures aligned with SOC 2 and other compliance requirements
- Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (primarily Terraform) for repeatable, auditable deployments
- Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines to streamline build, test, and release processes for our engineering teams
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve production issues across our services, networking, and data layers
- Drive observability and reliability through logging, metrics, alerting, and incident response practices
- Collaborate with engineering to design systems that are secure, cost-effective, and easy to operate in production
- Take ownership of core infrastructure components (VPCs, IAM, networking, storage, containers, etc.) and continuously improve them
What You'll Need
- 3+ years of hands-on experience managing production infrastructure in AWS
- Strong experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code workflows
- Solid understanding of AWS core services (EC2, RDS, ECS/EKS or similar, S3, IAM, networking, security groups, load balancers)
- Experience operating and hardening Linux-based systems in production
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and deploying containerized workloads
- Experience working within security/compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar)
- Proven track record of owning systems end-to-end rather than isolated tasks
- Ability to diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure and performance issues
- Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating closely with engineers and leadership
Nice to Have
- AWS certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, SysOps Administrator)
- Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
- Experience in at least one programming language (ideally Python) for tooling, automation, and integrations
- Background supporting SaaS or fintech products with high security and uptime requirements
- Experience setting up and tuning observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch)
- Experience with secrets management, key management, and identity management at scale
Benefits
- Own core infrastructure at a product-critical layer instead of being a ticket taker on a giant platform team
- Work on a modern stack at the intersection of tax, fintech, and AI, where reliability and security really matter
- Help shape DevOps/Platform practices, tooling, and standards from an early stage, with real influence on architecture decisions
- Partner directly with experienced engineers, tax experts, and leadership
- Join a well-funded company with strong industry investors and partners, building the first new IRS-approved e-file platform for major return types in decades
- Grow your career in a role that blends cloud engineering, security, and reliability while shipping visible, meaningful work
Equal Opportunity Employer - M/F/D/V
We trust our team with sensitive information, so all candidates who receive and accept employment offers must complete a background check before joining us. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Instead
About Instead
Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.
Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com), IRIS (irisglobal.com) the largest tax software provider in the UK and many of our partners and customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.
Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.
About the role
At Instead, we’re unlocking millions in tax savings for businesses and individuals—and we’re looking for a creative and talented Product Designer who is eager to contribute to our mission. You’ll join forces with our Head of Design and US-based design team, product managers, and engineers to design and refine our flagship Instead platform—guiding taxpayers and tax advisors from tax strategy discovery through to filing their tax returns. As you follow and contribute to our design system to craft intuitive, user-friendly interfaces that balance user needs with engineering requirements and sprint timelines. You’ll also collaborate closely with customer support, cross-functional product teams, and our US-based design team to ensure every interaction effortlessly empowers our users navigating a complex domain.
What you'll do
- Design user-friendly interfaces for the Instead platform that guide taxpayers through complex tax-saving strategies through rapid iterations
- Showcase your designs through rapid prototyping to stakeholders and customers
- Follow and evolve our design system, ensuring consistency across the product and simplify the design process
- Work closely with cross-functional teams (engineering, product, marketing) to create designs that are both user-friendly and technically feasible
- Coordinate with customer support and product teams to ensure designs meet user needs and customer expectations
- Regularly meet and collaborate with our US-based design team to to ideate, uphold design quality and maintain consistency
- Ensure engineering team output matches the quality and specifications of your designs
- Utilize a design toolkit to connect-the-dots across different product areas to solve design challenges
What you'll need
- 2+ years of experience in Product Design, UI, or a related visual design field
- An innovative portfolio demonstrating Product Design, UX/UI design, problem-solving, and successful project outcomes through a keen eye for detail
- An interest and exploration of AI design tools and practices
- Expert knowledge of UI design principles and techniques
- Knowledge of design systems and component libraries
- The ability and desire to keep learning, fail fast, and pivot
- Strong attention to detail and ability to defend user-centric design thinking
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills
- Proficient in Figma and knowledgeable or eager to use emerging AI design tools.
Nice to have
- Experience working with distributed global teams
- User research and testing methodologies
- Knowledgeable about front-end UI frameworks
- Experience designing for financial or tax-related products
- Familiarity with tax processes or financial services
Why join us
- Ability to work with next-gen AI in all stages of the design and software development lifecycle
- Direct design to code tooling for faster exploration
- Work on a cutting-edge tax tech platform that's transforming the industry
- Be part of a collaborative, mission-driven team
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Opportunity to directly impact how users interact with complex tax strategies
- Work with innovative technology and contribute to meaningful user experiences
Equal Opportunity Employer - M/F/D/V
As a global business, we rely on diversity of culture and thought to deliver on our goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.
We trust our team with sensitive information, so all candidates who receive and accept employment offers must complete a background check before joining us.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Instead
About Instead
Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.
Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com), IRIS (irisglobal.com) the largest tax software provider in the UK and many of our partners and customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.
Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.
About the role
We're seeking an experienced Product Manager to facilitate and manage projects from start to finish for our Instead product teams. Instead is our innovative tax technology platform with over 100+ tax strategies that helps clients identify and implement tax savings opportunities, guiding users through eligibility determination, savings calculations, and step-by-step implementation processes. You'll work closely with engineers, designers, and other product stakeholders to drive key features and improvements, coordinating seamlessly between our US product teams and India-based designers and engineers while engaging directly with customers to understand their needs and translate them into actionable product requirements.
What you'll do
- Build and facilitate product requirements documents with key stakeholders involved in product decisions
- Run daily standups with the India team and join US standups to coordinate between global teams
- Manage sprint planning and retrospectives with India team while coordinating alongside US teams
- Review quality assurance processes, test features before launch, and monitor live production performance
- Review customer requests and bugs, prioritizing them based on impact and business value
- Track product timelines and ensure teams stay on track with committed deliverables
- Identify and escalate issues blocking teams or personnel who need additional help, training, or project reassignment
- Meet with customers to understand key needs and gather feedback alongside the support team
What you'll need
- Background in product management with hands-on experience in a product manager role
- Experience working at a company in a product management capacity
- Proven track record of working collaboratively with engineers and designers
- Strong project management and facilitation skills
- Excellent communication skills for coordinating across global teams
- Ability to prioritize competing demands and manage multiple projects simultaneously
Nice to have
- Experience working in a startup environment
- Experience with agile methodologies and sprint management tools
- Background in SaaS or technology products
- Experience coordinating between distributed global teams
Why join us
- Ability to work with cutting edge AI in all stages of the software development lifecycle
- Work on a cutting-edge tax tech platform that's transforming the industry
- Be part of a collaborative, mission-driven team
- Competitive compensation and benefits
Equal Opportunity Employer - M/F/D/V
As a global business, we rely on diversity of culture and thought to deliver on our goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.
We trust our team with sensitive information, so all candidates who receive and accept employment offers must complete a background check before joining us.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Instead
About Instead
Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes and file tax returns. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.
Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com) and many of our customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer, Bloomberg — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.
Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.
What You'll Do
- Own and manage our AWS infrastructure across environments (staging, production, internal tools) for a high-availability tax platform
- Design, implement, and maintain secure, scalable cloud architectures aligned with SOC 2 and other compliance requirements
- Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (primarily Terraform) for repeatable, auditable deployments
- Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines to streamline build, test, and release processes for our engineering teams
- Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve production issues across our services, networking, and data layers
- Drive observability and reliability through logging, metrics, alerting, and incident response practices
- Collaborate with engineering to design systems that are secure, cost-effective, and easy to operate in production
- Take ownership of core infrastructure components (VPCs, IAM, networking, storage, containers, etc.) and continuously improve them
What You'll Need
- 3+ years of hands-on experience managing production infrastructure in AWS
- Strong experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code workflows
- Solid understanding of AWS core services (EC2, RDS, ECS/EKS or similar, S3, IAM, networking, security groups, load balancers)
- Experience operating and hardening Linux-based systems in production
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and deploying containerized workloads
- Experience working within security/compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar)
- Proven track record of owning systems end-to-end rather than isolated tasks
- Ability to diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure and performance issues
- Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating closely with engineers and leadership
Nice to Have
- AWS certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, SysOps Administrator)
- Experience with Kubernetes in production environments
- Experience in at least one programming language (ideally Python) for tooling, automation, and integrations
- Background supporting SaaS or fintech products with high security and uptime requirements
- Experience setting up and tuning observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch)
- Experience with secrets management, key management, and identity management at scale
Benefits
- Own core infrastructure at a product-critical layer instead of being a ticket taker on a giant platform team
- Work on a modern stack at the intersection of tax, fintech, and AI, where reliability and security really matter
- Help shape DevOps/Platform practices, tooling, and standards from an early stage, with real influence on architecture decisions
- Partner directly with experienced engineers, tax experts, and leadership
- Join a well-funded company with strong industry investors and partners, building the first new IRS-approved e-file platform for major return types in decades
- Grow your career in a role that blends cloud engineering, security, and reliability while shipping visible, meaningful work
Equal Opportunity Employer - M/F/D/V
We trust our team with sensitive information, so all candidates who receive and accept employment offers must complete a background check before joining us. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Instead
About Instead
Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes. As the first company in decades to receive IRS approvals to E-file 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120S, and 1065 — we're re-inventing a complex category. Founded in 2023, Instead combines LLMs with tax law to make tax management a continuous, proactive process rather than a dreaded annual deadline.
Instead's investors include Sarah Guo from Conviction (conviction.com), IRIS (irisglobal.com) the largest tax software provider in the UK and many of our partners and customers who believe in our mission and vision. The Instead team comprises talented leaders from leading tax, financial services and fintech companies — Gusto, Intuit, Zenefits, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer — as well as top tax & accounting firms such as PwC, BDO, RSM, and KPMG.
Instead was a 2024 Innovation Award Finalist in CPA Practice Advisor. Instead's CEO, Andrew Argue, is a CPA and has been named Top 100 Most Influential People in the Accounting Profession twice - Ones To Watch and CPA Practice Advisors 20 under 40.
About the role
In this role, you will get the chance to build innovative AI-powered tax software alongside a dynamic team. You'll work on both our customer-facing product Instead (instead.com) and our backend internal tooling that empowers our teams to build cutting-edge features. This role is at the forefront of leveraging AI to drive innovation across our platform, working on exciting high-value features for our customers. If you're passionate about working on real production use cases utilizing LLMs and want to contribute to groundbreaking AI applications in a fast-paced environment, you'll thrive as you help us drive innovation in tax technology.
Here is the tech you will get the chance to utilize:
- Front End: Vue, Nuxt, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
- Back End: Go, Docker on AWS ECS/Fargate, PostgreSQL on AWS RDS
- AI: Cursor with Sonnet 3.5, Langchain, Helicone, Gemini, OpenAI's API utilizing 4o (still exploring best use cases for o1 pro) and any other piece of AI tech that we can get our hands on
What you'll do
- Ship full-stack product features end to end for our live customer platform
- Make key product improvements based on customer feedback and usage analytics
- Understand and solve critical product bugs across the full stack
- Build and integrate components for infrastructure, supporting production-level inference and advanced prompt engineering
- Create tools and internal platforms to enhance the productivity and capabilities of Instead's teams
- Additional projects as needed by the internal engineering team and US-based product teams
What you'll need
- Proficiency in full-stack development, with a strong understanding of web frameworks, backend systems, and cloud infrastructure
- Experience building backend systems and infrastructure that can support live products
- 3+ years of software development experience
- High attention to detail
- Fast learner who enjoys working in a fast-paced, innovative environment
Nice to have
- A track record of working on full-stack projects, end-to-end
- Experience with AI/ML frameworks and prompt engineering
- Experience programming using AI copilots such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Windsurf, etc.
- Experience with the technologies in our current stack
- Experience building customer-facing products at scale
Why join us
- Ability to work with cutting edge AI in all stages of the software development lifecycle
- Work on a cutting-edge tax tech platform that's transforming the industry
- Be part of a collaborative, mission-driven team
- Competitive compensation and benefits
- Growth opportunities in product development, compliance, and technology
- Opportunity to work with cutting-edge AI technology in production environments
Equal Opportunity Employer - M/F/D/V
As a global business, we rely on diversity of culture and thought to deliver on our goals. To ensure we can do that, we seek talented, qualified employees in all our operations around the world regardless of race, color, sex/gender, including pregnancy, gender identity and expression, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, age, marital status, citizen status, veteran status, or any other protected classification under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and for sincerely held religious beliefs in accordance with applicable law.
We trust our team with sensitive information, so all candidates who receive and accept employment offers must complete a background check before joining us.
Ready to apply?
Apply to Instead