Backend Software Engineer

Soraban is a Series A startup automating the most painful parts of tax season for CPA firms. Our platform handles client data collection, document delivery, and tax workflow automation for firms across the country — and we're growing fast. We're a small, fast-moving engineering team where everyone ships, everyone owns what they build, and there's no committee between a good idea and production.

About Soraban Connect

Soraban Connect is a product that bridges between our cloud platform and the desktop tax software that CPA firms actually run (UltraTax, Lacerte, and several others) that were never designed with APIs or automation in mind. Connect comprises a Windows application, a backend API service, and automation scripts that programmatically drive this software to eliminate hours of manual data entry per return.

This is automation against software that actively resists being automated. It's some of the most interesting engineering work we do since there’s no obvious, straight and narrow path. It requires creative thinking to build workarounds and solutions that can be messy. When it works, accountants get days of their lives back during tax season.

What you'll do

• Build and extend automation that controls professional tax software, navigating UIs programmatically, moving data reliably, and handling the thousand edge cases real tax returns produce
• Make automation resilient. Tax software vendors ship updates that break things. You'll build the testing, monitoring, and tooling that catch breakage early and make fixes fast, turning fragile scripts into dependable infrastructure
• Develop the backend API service (Python) that coordinates between our cloud platform and the desktop world
• Improve the Windows application (Python) that firms install and run including packaging, updates, and the local runtime that hosts the automation

What we're looking for

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong Python
• Experience with UI, browser, or desktop automation (Selenium, Playwright, pywinauto, AutoHotkey, or you rolled your own — we care about the intuition, not the tool)
• Debugging tenacity. Automation against opaque desktop software means investigating problems with limited visibility. You should find that fun, or at least deeply satisfying
• Comfort working on and targeting Windows environments
• A bias toward shipping. You'd rather get a working version in front of users this week than a perfect one next month
• A fast ramp. You'll join a mature codebase with real users, and we expect (and support) new engineers contributing meaningful work within their first few weeks, not after a quarter of onboarding
• Interest and drive to dive into unfamiliar territory and deliver

Nice to have

• Experience with tax, accounting, or fintech software
• FastAPI or similar Python API frameworks
• Windows application packaging, installers, or code signing
• Experience making flaky systems reliable (retries, idempotency, observability)

How we work

Our values aren't wall art. They describe how decisions actually get made here:

• Mission focused: The mission is our north star. We stay focused on what moves it forward and tune out the noise.
• Default to action: Move quickly and iterate. Progress over perfection. Learn by shipping.
• Solve with data: Instinct gets us asking the right questions — data gets us to the right answer.
• Automate first: Automate the repetitive work so we can focus where we add the most value. (This role is this value.)

Why this role

• Ownership from day one. Small team, no layers. The automation you build ships to real firms, and you'll see the impact directly
• Rare technical territory. Desktop automation at production scale is a niche most engineers never touch. You'll build skills and judgment that generalize far beyond this product
• Series A momentum. We've found product-market fit with CPA firms and are scaling. Joining now means growing with the company, not maintaining someone else's decisions
• In-person team in Chandler. We work together in the office with fast feedback loops and light meeting schedules.

Logistics

• Full-time, in-office in Chandler, AZ
• Health, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Paid time off