Tax Analyst SME

Role Summary

We are seeking a Tax Analyst with a focus on being a Tax Planning Subject Matter Expert (SME) to support the design, development, and quality of next-generation, AI enabled tax software solutions. This role brings real-world accounting and tax practitioner expertise into product development, ensuring that tax planning rules are implemented accurately and reflect how tax professionals work in practice.

The ideal candidate has 3-5 years of experience at a CPA firm, with hands-on responsibility for tax return preparation and tax planning. Experience in the 1040 space is required, and exposure to pass-through returns and K-1s is preferred. This role partners closely with product, software engineering, and quality teams to clarify complex rules, define edge cases, validate calculations, and ensure software behavior aligns with practitioner expectations.

Key Responsibilities

• Tax domain & content expertise
• Interpret tax rules and translate them into implementable logic for planning calculations, rates, thresholds, phaseouts, and lookup-table driven behavior.
• Identify edge cases and scenarios that must be supported to meet practitioner expectations and compliance needs.
• Provide authoritative guidance on rule interpretation in complex or ambiguous scenarios.

• Maintain awareness of tax law and administrative guidance changes that impact planning content and tooling.

• Next gen tool enablement

• Translate practitioner knowledge into clear functional guidance for product, engineering and QA teams.
• Partner with product and engineering to define and refine workflows for next-generation content maintenance and validate calculation logic and outcomes against real world tax scenarios.
• Surface adoption risks early and propose mitigations.

• Provide hands-on feedback from use cases to improve usability, trust, and efficiency of the tooling.

• Requirements, validation, and quality

• Author clear functional requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria that are testable and aligned to practitioner outcomes.
• Validate calculations, roll-forwards and reporting outputs to ensure accuracy and compliance.
• Assist QA teams by reviewing test cases and identifying coverage gaps.
• Serve as domain escalation point for defects discovered during testing.
• Create, review, and execute test plans (including UAT) to validate accuracy, consistency, and regression stability across releases.

• Investigate and triage defects; collaborate with QA and engineering to identify root cause and confirm fixes.

• Cross-functional collaboration & communication

• Represent the voice of the tax practitioner and ensure alignment with real-world workflows.
• Serve as the day-to-day tax compliance representative in cross-functional discussions, balancing speed of delivery with quality and risk management.
• Communicate complex tax and workflow concepts clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences, document decisions and rationale.
• Support demos, enablement sessions, and quick-reference guidance to accelerate adoption across the analyst community.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of experience in tax preparation, tax technology, tax research, or tax content development (public accounting, industry, or software) primarily with 1040 federal and state returns required, with additional exposure to pass through returns and K-1s preferred.
• CPA or CPA eligible preferred.
• Strong understanding of how tax professionals use planning tools and the types of data/lookup tables that drive planning outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to translate tax rules into precise, testable requirements and validate outcomes through scenario-based testing.
• High attention to detail and comfort working with ambiguity; proactive in surfacing risks, assumptions, and gaps.
• Experience with commercial tax planning and/or compliance software (as a practitioner user or within a tax software organization).
• Exposure to data-driven content maintenance, rule engines, or structured content systems.
• Experience supporting change management, training, demos, or analyst enablement for new tooling.
• Comfort using developer-adjacent tooling (e.g., test environments, issue tracking systems, basic query or scripting) to accelerate analysis and validation.

Communication & Leadership Skills

• Written and verbal communication and story telling skills, with the ability to explain complex tax and accounting concepts clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across product, engineering, QA, and leadership teams in a matrixed environment.
• Comfort providing clear, timely guidance and constructive feedback to support decision making and quality outcomes even when situations may feel conflicting or tense.
• Ability to influence without formal authority/title or reporting structure by grounding recommendations in practitioner experience and data.
• Proactive communicator who surfaces risks, ambiguities, and edge cases early to avoid downstream rework.
• Demonstrated professionalism and credibility when representing practitioner perspectives in cross functional discussions.

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.

Compensation:

$43,900.00 - $75,250.00 USD. Compensation range listed is based on primary location of the position. Actual base salary offer is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience and actual hiring location. Your recruiter can share more information about the specific offer for the job location during the hiring process.

Additional Information:

Wolters Kluwer offers a wide variety of competitive benefits and programs to help meet your needs and balance your work and personal life, including but not limited to: Medical, Dental, & Vision Plans, 401(k), FSA/HSA, Commuter Benefits, Tuition Assistance Plan, Vacation and Sick Time, and Paid Parental Leave. Full details of our benefits are available upon request.