Principal AI Data Scientist

About the Company

Taxwell is a leading digital tax filing platform formed in 2022 from the combination of Drake Software® and TaxAct®. These two longstanding organizations offer customers professional and do-it-yourself digital and downloadable products that are easy-to-use, best-in-class technology, and provide unparalleled customer support. Taxwell brands 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. Taxwell is an organization of forward thinkers looking to add industry experts to our growing team.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal AI Data Scientist to lead the design, development, and deployment of AI-powered systems across Taxwell. These systems include:

• AI tools and applications used across multiple internal departments (engineering, operations, support, product, tax, compliance, and more)
• Customer-facing AI capabilities embedded into existing products to deliver intelligent, AI-powered experiences
• Design and development of vertical AI solutions for the tax and compliance industry, as well as AI-native products built with generative AI at their core

This is a senior, hands-on technical role for a Data Scientist who has operated at the Principal level and has a strong track record of turning emerging AI capabilities into production-grade systems with real business impact. You’ll apply technical expertise across AI evaluation, retrieval optimization, memory and state management, and AI agent architecture to support real-time insights and decision-making.

Responsibilities

AI Platforms & Internal Enablement

• Design and build AI-powered tools that improve productivity across engineering and non-engineering teams (e.g., developer workflows, customer support tooling, tax development, operations, compliance, and analytics).
• Develop evaluation strategies covering model quality, retrieval optimization, benchmarking, and performance monitoring for deployed AI systems.
• Develop internal AI platforms, shared services, and reusable components that enable teams to safely and effectively build AI-powered applications.
• Build and maintain retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems grounded in internal documentation, codebases, tax knowledge, and proprietary data.
• Partner with DevOps, platform, and security teams to ensure AI systems are scalable, observable, secure, and compliant.

Customer-Facing AI & AI-Native Products

• Embed AI capabilities into existing Taxwell products to improve accuracy, usability, personalization, and customer outcomes.
• Architect and build new customer-facing products where AI is a core differentiator, not an add-on.
• Work closely with product, design, and tax domain experts to translate real user problems into effective AI powered solutions.
• Ensure AI features meet high standards for reliability, explainability, and trust—especially in a regulated domain like tax.

Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Design and implement agent-based systems using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, ADK, or similar.
• Evaluate and integrate commercial and open-source AI technologies, including frontier models and open-weight LLMs.
• Establish best practices for prompt engineering, evaluation, monitoring, and continuous improvement of AI systems.
• Influence AI architecture and technical direction across the organization through design review and hands-on collaboration.
• Measure system effectiveness using telemetry, automated metrics, and qualitative feedback from internal and external users.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of Data Science experience, including 3+ years' operating at a Principal or Staff-level role.
• 5+ years of experience with Generative AI, LLMs, AI agents, or RAG applications, and designing, developing, and deploying AI solutions.
• 3+ years of experience with AI agents and AI evaluation strategies in enterprise environments.
• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript.
• Experience integrating AI systems with real-world applications, workflows, and data sources.
• Familiarity with vector databases and embedding techniques (e.g., Pinecone, FAISS, Chroma).
• Experience deploying and operating systems on AWS, GCP, Azure, Databricks, or Snowflakes.
• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to balance experimentation with production rigor.

Preferred Skills

• Experience building AI platforms or internal copilots used across multiple teams or departments.
• Experience developing customer-facing AI products at scale.
• Background in regulated industries such as fintech, tax, or healthcare.
• Experience fine-tuning or customizing open-weight models (e.g., GPT-OSS-120B, Mistral 3, GLM-4.7).

Equal Opportunity Statement

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, disability, 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 828-349-5887 to speak with a member of the HR Talent Acquisition team.