Tax Engine Lead

Fonoa is the Tax Operating System for autonomous tax. AI that tracks every rule, acts on every obligation, and proves every decision, built on modular infrastructure.

Fonoa's modules cover the full indirect tax lifecycle: tax ID validation, real-time tax determination, e-invoicing, and returns. All on one shared data model and integration, with one audit trail. Each added capability makes the others stronger.

Agents monitor obligations, populate returns, catch anomalies and assemble audit packs in seconds. The system does the work. Humans make the calls. That's autonomous tax.

Trusted by Canva, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Zoom and Booking.com.

Find out more: www.fonoa.com

The role

As Tax Engine Strategic Lead at Fonoa, you'll own the product strategy and technical direction of the Tax Engine. You'll translate deep, hands-on experience across multiple tax engines and tax-product organisations into a clear point of view on what Fonoa's Tax Engine should become, where it should compete, and how content and AI scale together.

The role spans product vision, content strategy, competitive judgement, and tax credibility for the build. You'll operate through the Tax Engine PM and the engineering team, not through customer projects, and not by managing a team of implementers.

This is a Director-equivalent IC role, strategic and deeply hands-on, reporting to the Chief Tax Officer. We're looking for cross-engine pattern recognition, calm under pressure, and the seniority to operate as the PM's tax-domain equal.

What you'll do

• Own the Tax Engine product vision. Execute the point of view on what Tax Engine 2.0 looks like: how it differentiates in a mature competitive market, how it leverages Fonoa's AI positioning, and what the 18-month build sequence should be. Own the narrative the PM and engineering team build against.

• Drive content strategy and velocity. Define how tax content (rates, rules, jurisdictions, scenarios) is sourced, validated, structured, and scaled.

• Partner with the PM as a tax-domain equal. Own the tax half of every prioritisation, design, and trade-off conversation. The PM doesn't translate tax into product. You already speak both.

• Hold the tax bar for the product. Act as the senior tax authority for Tax Engine inside Fonoa. Sign off on design decisions, content from external partners, and edge cases engineering or PM can't resolve alone. Bring a sharp, competitive view to product reviews, not just when asked.

• Direct the central tax research and content development function into Tax Engine. Define what support Tax Engine requires from this team (projects, content reviews, scenario testing) and ensure that work consistently meets the quality bar required by the product.

About you

• Multi-product, multi-vendor tax engine experience (non-negotiable). You've worked on or with more than one tax engine in the indirect tax space. Pattern recognition across products is what makes this profile rare. Single-vendor backgrounds, however senior, don't meet the bar.

• 10+ years in indirect tax or tax technology. Enough seniority to have seen multiple product cycles, multiple market shifts, and multiple failure modes. This is a judgement seat, not a skills one.

• Product-leaning, hands-on at seniority. The strongest backgrounds combine vendor product teams, top-tier indirect tax technology consulting, or in-house at a global digital platform that built or heavily customised its own tax engine. You can still go deep on a specific design decision or edge case. Pure managerial profiles who've stopped touching the work won't pass the panel.

• A real view on AI in content. You can articulate where AI adds genuine leverage in content generation, validation, and maintenance, and where deterministic infrastructure must still own the answer. Not buzzword-level.

• Product judgement under constraint. Given a Tax Engine 2.0 prompt, you can structure a response: what to build first, what to deliberately not build, and why. You reason from customer and competitive position, not from tax theory.

• PM partnership and calm under pressure. You operate as a tax-domain equal to the PM, not as an oracle or a gatekeeper. Grounded and clear-headed when everyone around you is sprinting.

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