Taxwell helps everyday Americans get every tax advantage they deserve by finding credits and deductions they never even knew existed. Our tax preparation software offers easy guidance and ensures your maximum tax refund. We strive to build a team of like-minded experts in both tax and technology who align with our brand purpose, are advocates for our customers and have a fresh, non-traditional approach to the tax industry.

TaxAct is a leading digital tax filing platform which offers customers do-it-yourself digital and downloadable products that are easy-to-use, best-in-class technology, and provide unparalleled customer support. We are a trusted solution for all users including those with complex tax returns. We strive to attract and retain candidates who exemplify our values: performance, perseverance, progress and partnership. TaxAct is a member of the Taxwell family of products. We are an organization of forward thinkers looking to add industry experts to our growing team.

This role will primarily support TaxAct as the organization helps everyday Americans file their taxes. We seek to build a team of experts in tax and technology who are customer advocates and have the mindset to reimagine the services our customers receive.

We’re looking for a Principal Software Engineer to drive critical initiatives across our pre-auth, authentication, and early customer experience surfaces. These areas are foundational to how customers first encounter and engage with our platform—and demand a blend of reliability, usability, and forward-thinking design.

This is a high-leverage, individual contributor (IC) role. You’ll report directly to the Senior Director of Engineering, working closely with cross-functional partners across engineering, product, design, and leadership. You’ll be trusted to take on complex, cross-cutting business problems—not just scoped projects—and lead them from problem definition through implementation. You won’t manage people, but you will lead through influence, technical authority, and delivery.

This is a hands-on role: you’ll spend a significant portion of your time writing production code, prototyping solutions, exploring new tools, and jumping into unfamiliar systems to unblock teams. At Taxwell, we’re also embracing the power of AI to enhance how we build software. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll help integrate and scale AI-assisted development practices into our workflows while upholding thoughtful, durable engineering standards.

Responsibilities

Technical Strategy & Architecture

Lead architecture, design, and delivery of key platform capabilities within our pre-auth, authentication, and early customer experience surfaces.
Drive consistency and quality across services, UIs, and shared layers by shaping engineering standards and championing best practices.
Collaborate with product and design to turn customer and business problems into elegant, scalable, and maintainable solutions.
Evaluate and prototype new technologies—including AI-assisted tooling—to solve complex engineering challenges.
Tackle foundational initiatives like migrating our entire authentication stack to a new provider, or identifying and rewriting underperforming pre-auth surfaces to significantly improve Lighthouse scores and perceived performance.

Cross-Team Engineering Leadership

Act as a technical lead for high-impact initiatives that span multiple teams and disciplines—working from first principles to define, scope, and solve ambiguous business problems.
Balance strategic thinking with deep implementation—you’ll often be the first to prototype a solution or dig into a legacy system to find the real root cause.
Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering managers and senior ICs, providing mentorship and reviewing critical designs and code.
Partner with DevOps, QA, and security teams to ensure performance, observability, and reliability are first-class concerns.

AI-Forward Development

Model effective use of AI-powered development tools for tasks like code generation, testing, documentation, and research.
Help teams adopt AI thoughtfully, balancing productivity gains with quality, clarity, and team learning.
Contribute to Taxwell’s internal AI practices by piloting new tools, providing feedback, and guiding platform-level adoption. Teams are encouraged to explore tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Codex, and agentic workflows (e.g., MCP-style orchestrators), though integration is still spotty and evolving.

Qualifications

Experience

10+ years in software engineering, with deep experience delivering and operating web applications at scale.
Proven track record of leading large technical initiatives across multiple teams, especially in customer-facing or platform-critical areas.
Comfortable operating across functions—engineering, product, and design—to shape solutions that align technical goals with user and business needs.
Experience in domains like authentication, onboarding, or identity management is a strong plus.

Technical Expertise

Significant production experience with Vue.js and C#/.NET—our primary frontend and backend technologies.
Experience with related tools (e.g., React, Angular, Java, Go) is welcome—but you must be comfortable learning and contributing in Vue.js and .NET environments.
Deep experience with AWS (e.g., compute, storage, messaging, infrastructure-as-code).
Proficiency with Kubernetes—you’ve deployed and debugged containerized applications in production environments.
You write production-grade code regularly and effectively—whether shipping new features, modernizing legacy services, or building shared tooling.
Strong grasp of architectural patterns: REST APIs, service decomposition, asynchronous workflows, CI/CD, observability, and secure development.

Mindset & Communication

You treat business outcomes as your scope. You define problems and lead others through solving them.
Exceptional communicator with the ability to explain complex topics clearly and adjust to different audiences (technical and non-technical).
Hands-on, pragmatic, and proactive. You seek out ambiguity and move teams forward with clarity and momentum.
Committed to the success of your peers—through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and fostering a high-trust engineering culture. You'll collaborate with high-trust peers who value pragmatic solutions, principled debate, and shared accountability.

Bonus Points

Experience building or integrating AI-assisted development workflows.
Experience in highly regulated domains (e.g., tax, fintech, healthcare).

_At Taxwell, we believe our work benefits from the diverse perspectives of our employees. As such, Taxwell welcomes and celebrates diversity and inclusion and is committed to equal opportunity employment. At Taxwell, you can expect a supportive, open, and inclusive atmosphere and a team that values your contributions.

_Taxwell is committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, d__isability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, and any other status protected under applicable _law. Taxwell considers information gathered in the hiring process, including information on this application, confidential, and only shares it on a need-to-know basis or as required by law.

_If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at HR@Taxwell.com or by calling 828-349-5703 extension 6049 to speak with a member of the HR Talent Acquisition team.