AP US Tax Advisory LLC

AP US Tax Compliance and Advisory is a US tax firm based in Israel serving Israeli investors with US real estate and US citizens living abroad. Owner-run, growing, and building its own technology.

THE PROJECT

We are building our own client platform for the 2027 US filing season. The backend (FastAPI, Postgres, an integration with our tax software's REST API) is owned by our lead engineer; you own everything the user sees: a client portal for taxpayers and their representatives, a staff console for coordinators, preparers, reviewers and signers, and later a dashboard for partnership sponsors. The product is forms and documents: engagement letters and consents as click-through, a conditional questionnaire generated from a versioned JSON schema, document upload and extraction confirmation, attestation, payment, e-signature, status and delivery. Two languages, English and Hebrew, with right-to-left layout done properly.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Front-end architecture: Next.js (App Router), TypeScript, a component library (Radix/shadcn or similar), i18n with RTL, state management, API client generated from the OpenAPI spec.

- Schema-driven form engine: render questionnaires from JSON schema with conditional visibility, repeating groups (properties, partners, K-1s), validation messages in both languages, evidence attachments, autosave and resume.

- Auth: passwordless magic link and OTP for clients, MFA for staff, step-up verification before sensitive screens; session handling that never stores identifiers client-side.

- Documents: pre-signed upload with progress and type/size checks, previews, extraction confirmation UI (side-by-side document and proposed values, correct and confirm).

- Payments and signatures: Stripe Checkout or Elements, e-signature vendor handoff and status, wet-signature upload path.

- Staff console: job board with filters, engagement detail, gates (ruling, review, release with typed authorization), masked identifiers with logged unmask, audit view.

- Quality: accessibility (WCAG AA), responsive phone-first client screens, Playwright end-to-end tests, CSP and front-end security review.

- Collaboration: the lead engineer on API contracts; an AI assistant that writes specifications and reviews every pull request; weekly 30-minute call with the owner.

REQUIREMENTS

- 4+ years React in production, 2+ years Next.js and TypeScript.

- Shipped at least one forms-heavy product (onboarding, KYC, insurance, lending, tax, healthcare intake) and at least one bilingual or RTL product (Hebrew or Arabic).

- Auth and payment flows implemented end to end.

- Comfortable reading and writing Python for API endpoints and tests.

- Clear written English; four hours of daily overlap with UTC+2; availability December 2026 through June 2027, 30-40 hours per week.

NICE TO HAVE: FastAPI; Playwright; design skills; fintech or document-processing UX; Hebrew.

ENGAGEMENT TERMS

- Independent contractor (B2B) via Deel, Payoneer or Upwork; NDA, IP assignment and the firm's confidentiality agreement signed before repository access.

- Phase 1: December 1, 2026 to April 30, 2027, 30-40 h/week; USD 3,000-5,000 per month (or USD 25-40/h).

- Phase 2: May 2027 onward, retained maintenance 5-15 h/week, priced separately.

- Access: development and staging only; synthetic data; no production access.

- Remote; Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Armenia, Serbia, Kazakhstan and similar time zones preferred. Not available to contractors located in Russia.

PROCESS

1. Written application: CV or profile, links to two shipped products you built the front end of, and a short answer to: how would you render a 60-question conditional questionnaire from a JSON schema in two languages, one of them right-to-left, so that a non-technical person can change the questions without a deploy?

2. 30-minute call with the owner.

3. Paid trial task: 10-15 hours over one week, USD 500 paid regardless of outcome: a schema-driven form slice with RTL and validation against a provided API stub.

4. References, contract, onboarding. Target start: December 1, 2026.

Applications without the links and the answer are not reviewed.

AP US Tax Compliance and Advisory is a US tax firm based in Israel serving Israeli investors with US real estate and US citizens living abroad. Owner-run, growing, and building its own technology.

THE PROJECT

We prepare US tax returns in Wolters Kluwer CCH Axcess and have automated most of the preparation through CCH's REST API: import, calculation, printing, review memos, e-file qualification and release all run from code today. What runs in scripts must become a product before the 2027 filing season: a client platform where clients (or their AI assistants) complete a structured intake, the system extracts data from documents, prepares the return through CCH, routes it to a human reviewer and signer, collects an e-signature and payment, releases the e-file and delivers the result. The design document, data model, state machine, API and security model are written. You will be the first engineer and you will own the backend.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Backend architecture and implementation: Python 3.12, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy/Alembic, Postgres, a job queue, workers, webhooks.

- The CCH Axcess API module as a server-side job runner: one in-flight job per return, global concurrency limits, exponential backoff on locks, idempotency keys, prompt handling, structured results, parked-job alerts.

- Security engineering: PII vault with field-level encryption (KMS), tokenized payload assembly, append-only audit log, RBAC with step-up MFA for sensitive actions, PII-free logging with a redaction layer, secrets manager, backups and restore tests.

- Integrations: Stripe (payments, webhooks), an e-signature vendor with identity verification, Google Drive, transactional email, WhatsApp Business API, Anthropic API for document extraction with human confirmation.

- Infrastructure as code on AWS (ECS Fargate or App Runner, RDS, S3, KMS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch) or an agreed managed platform; CI with tests and security scans; staging and production environments; runbooks.

- You work against a mock CCH server built from our specification; production runs are performed by the firm. You will never hold production credentials or see client data.

- Collaboration: a full-stack engineer on the portal and staff console; an AI assistant that writes specifications and reviews every pull request before the owner sees it; a weekly 30-minute call with the owner.

- After the build: a retained maintenance agreement including on-call during the filing season.

REQUIREMENTS

- 5+ years building Python backends in production, 2+ years as the person responsible for a system's reliability.

- Deep Postgres: schema design, migrations, transactions, indexing, point-in-time recovery.

- Integrations with unreliable third-party APIs: retries, idempotency, partial failure, long-running jobs with polling.

- Security habits: least privilege, secrets management, no sensitive data in logs, dependency hygiene. You can explain how you would design a system where the people who build it never see the data it holds.

- Docker; one major cloud; infrastructure as code.

- Clear written English; you document decisions and write runbooks without being asked.

- At least four hours of daily overlap with Israel (UTC+2); availability December 2026 through June 2027 at 30-40 hours per week.

NICE TO HAVE

- Fintech, payments, accounting, insurance or health-data experience; SOC 2 or ISO 27001 exposure.

- LLM API experience (Anthropic/OpenAI SDKs, tool use, structured outputs) or MCP servers.

- Experience with XML-heavy enterprise APIs.

- Russian or Hebrew (the owner speaks both; not required).

ENGAGEMENT TERMS

- Independent contractor (B2B) via Deel, Payoneer or Upwork; NDA, IP assignment and the firm's confidentiality agreement signed before access to any repository.

- Phase 1: December 1, 2026 to April 30, 2027, 30-40 h/week; USD 3,500-6,000 per month (or USD 30-45/h) depending on seniority and hours.

- Phase 2: May 2027 onward, retained maintenance 10-20 h/week plus on-call in season, priced separately.

- Access: development and staging only; no production data, no production credentials; mock CCH server and synthetic data.

- Remote; Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, Armenia, Serbia, Kazakhstan and similar time zones preferred. Not available to contractors located in Russia.

PROCESS

1. Written application with three short answers: (a) one third-party API integration you built that had to survive locks, rate limits or inconsistent responses, and what you did about it; (b) how you keep secrets and personal data out of logs in a system you run; (c) your availability December 2026 to June 2027 and your overlap with UTC+2.

2. 30-minute call with the owner.

3. Paid trial task: 10-15 hours over one week, USD 500 paid regardless of outcome, on the mock server with synthetic data.

4. References, contract, onboarding. Target start: December 1, 2026.

Apply with a CV or LinkedIn profile, links to code or systems you are proud of, and the three answers. Applications without the answers are not reviewed.