Magnetic

AI Tax Preparer for CPA firms

Head of Operations

$150K - $220K1.00% - 2.50%San Francisco, CA, US
Job type
Full-time
Role
Operations
Experience
3+ years
Visa
US citizen/visa only
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Thomas Shelley
Thomas Shelley
Founder

About the role

About the role

The Role

Magnetic is building the AI tax preparation platform for modern CPA firms.

Our product pairs cutting-edge AI with expert tax professionals, enrolled agents, and CPAs to produce accuracy-guaranteed tax returns for accounting firms. We believe the future of tax work is not humans versus AI — it is expert humans guiding, improving, and supervising AI systems so firms can deliver better work faster, with dramatically less manual review.

We’re looking for a Head of Operations to build and run the human-in-the-loop operating system behind Magnetic.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who can design processes from scratch, manage expert reviewers, build lightweight internal tools, and create systems that make accuracy repeatable at scale. You will own the operational backbone that ensures every return meets our quality bar while continuously making the system faster, smarter, and more efficient.

Your mission is simple: help us deliver exceptionally accurate tax returns to CPA firms while reducing the amount of expert human review required over time.

What you’ll do

  • Own and scale Magnetic’s human-in-the-loop tax review operations end-to-end
  • Design workflows that combine AI outputs with expert tax professional review to ensure extremely high accuracy
  • Build systems that route the right work to the right reviewers at the right time
  • Create QA processes, performance dashboards, review checklists, escalation paths, and operating cadences
  • Manage a distributed team of tax professionals, enrolled agents, CPAs, and contractors
  • Develop performance management systems for reviewer quality, speed, reliability, and consistency
  • Partner closely with engineering and product to turn operational learnings into better AI systems
  • Identify where humans are spending too much time and build tools or processes to reduce unnecessary review
  • Create internal tooling using no-code tools, automation platforms, spreadsheets, AI tools, or lightweight coding
  • Continuously improve the process so experts can focus only on the highest-leverage review decisions
  • Build the operating foundation that allows Magnetic to scale from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of returns

Who you are

You are a systems builder. When faced with ambiguity, you create structure.

You are highly operational and highly analytical. You can look at a messy workflow, break it into its component parts, measure what matters, and turn it into a repeatable system.

You are comfortable managing people, especially distributed teams and contractors. You know how to set clear expectations, measure performance, give feedback, and improve output quality over time.

You are tool-native. You are comfortable building scrappy internal tools yourself, whether that means using Zapier, Airtable, Retool, spreadsheets, AI coding tools, or lightweight scripts. You do not wait for engineering to solve every operational problem.

You are obsessed with accuracy, but allergic to unnecessary complexity. You understand that the goal is not to add more review for its own sake — the goal is to build systems that make perfect output predictable, efficient, and scalable.

You would be a good fit for this role if you have

  • 5+ years in operations, product operations, marketplace operations, business operations, or a similarly systems-heavy role
  • Experience designing operational processes from scratch in a fast-moving environment
  • Experience managing teams of operators, reviewers, contractors, specialists, or distributed workers
  • Strong analytical instincts and comfort building dashboards, scorecards, and performance systems
  • Ability to create internal tools, automations, and workflows without depending entirely on engineering
  • A high ownership mindset — you notice what is broken and take responsibility for fixing it
  • Excellent attention to detail and a strong bias toward measurable, repeatable outcomes
  • Comfort working in ambiguity, especially where the “right process” has not yet been invented
  • Strong communication skills and the ability to work across product, engineering, operations, and customer-facing teams

Bonus points if you have

  • Experience in tax, accounting, financial services, or professional services operations
  • Experience working with CPAs, enrolled agents, tax preparers, or other expert reviewers
  • Experience with AI-assisted workflows, human-in-the-loop systems, QA operations, marketplace operations, or trust and safety operations
  • Experience at a fast-growing startup where you had to build processes before the company had mature infrastructure
  • Experience using AI tools or coding assistants to build internal tools quickly

Why this role matters

Magnetic’s promise to CPA firms depends on operational excellence.

Our AI can do increasingly powerful work, but the system only becomes truly world-class when expert human judgment is built into the loop in the right way. This role owns that loop.

You will be responsible for building the processes, tools, and team structures that allow Magnetic to deliver accuracy-guaranteed tax returns today while helping our AI improve over time. Done well, your work will become one of the company’s most important advantages: a scalable operating system for producing high-quality tax work faster than traditional firms ever could.

This is a role for someone who takes pride in making complex systems run cleanly, who enjoys building from zero to one, and who wants to help define the future of AI-powered tax preparation.

About Magnetic

Magnetic is building an AI tax preparer for CPA firms. Our software scans client documents - from handwritten charity notes to excel spreadsheet Schedule Cs to multi-state K-1s - and enters them into tax software automatically, saving hours of tedious data entry.

The accounting profession is facing a massive talent shortage, as graduates choose different professions and the old guard begins to retire. As a result, CPA and tax preparation firms are awash in clientele, but unable to keep up. At many firms, phones go unanswered, clients are "fired", and websites are taken down, as the existing workforce tries to handle the grueling 80 hour+ weeks necessary to push through tax season to the April 15th deadline.

We built this because a former colleague who owns her own tax firm asked us to automate her workload, and we quickly realized the massive opportunity. Thomas brings deep domain expertise as the former Head of Product at Keeper (YC W19), where he built tax engine automation systems and an OCR form scanning system that outperformed everything else on the market. At Keeper, he leveraged early access to OpenAI's LLMs (well before ChatGPT) to build systems that automated the entire tax filing process, allowing a tiny team of CPAs to process thousands of returns with near zero busy work. Patrick was the first engineer at FunCraft, shipping multiple mobile games with 1M+ downloads and building scalable shared codebases. We've worked together since 2017, including co-leading multiple teams at Zynga as PM & Tech Lead respectively.

We launched publicly in 2025 and have quickly grown to hundreds of thousands in ARR across many dozens of firms. We've completely automated over 25% of the return process so far and developed a proprietary vision model that beats incumbent scanning technology by almost 2x on accuracy. We raised $5.2M from top investors and are quickly growing our team in San Francisco.

The opportunity is massive - there are 80M US personal tax returns filed via professionals annually, in a $2B outsourcing market where individual CPA firms currently pay $100k-$1M per year for inferior services. We're positioned to capture significant market share by offering better accuracy & document coverage, instant processing, and superior user experience.

Magnetic
Founded:2024
Batch:S25
Team Size:10
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Founders
Patrick Fay
Patrick Fay
Founder
Thomas Shelley
Thomas Shelley
Founder