Tax Manager

AlphaTrust Advisors | Phoenix / Scottsdale, AZ

• Hybrid (3 days in office, 2 days remote)
• $130,000 to $165,000 base , plus performance bonus.
• Revenue-share and book-ownership structures available to the right candidate. If you're entrepreneurial by nature and have wanted to start your own firm, but the timing has never seemed right, we have a compelling option. This is an option, not a requirement.

We are hiring a Tax Manager who thinks like a consultant, not a preparer. At AlphaTrust that is not aspirational language, because the investment, estate, and insurance work happens under the same roof as the tax work.

If your best work happens in November, mapping out a client’s next five years of income recognition, and not just in March reconciling a stack of K-1s, we should talk.

About AlphaTrust

We are a boutique financial and tax advisory firm in Phoenix. We act as a chief financial officer for individuals and families, managing every part of their financial life rather than one slice of it. Investments, cash and liquidity, estate planning, insurance, and tax are all in-house. Most firms manage the money and outsource everything else. We do not.

That matters more for this role than it might sound. At a traditional CPA firm you design a strategy, hand it to the client, and hope someone executes it. Here, the people who would execute it sit down the hall. Our clients are high net worth individuals, families, business owners, and professionals whose situations do not fit a template, and the tax work is central to the advice rather than a compliance obligation at the end of it.

What this role actually is

This is a new seat, not a backfill. You will be in front of clients early rather than spending two years earning your way into the room.

You will own client relationships. You will sit across the table from business owners, families, and multi-generational wealth clients and tell them what to do, not just what happened. You will prepare and review the complex work, and you will drive the planning that makes the compliance work worth paying for.

An ideal client here is not simple. Think multi-state returns, layered K-1s from operating businesses and investment partnerships, equity compensation, real estate, charitable structures, and trusts that need real thought rather than a rollover from last year.

You will report to our Director of Tax and will have a preparer supporting you, with room to add a second as volume grows.

What you will do

• Lead client-facing planning and advisory meetings, including annual and mid-year planning sessions
• Build multi-year strategies to reduce lifetime tax, not just the current filing year
• Prepare and review complex individual returns involving multiple states and complicated K-1s
• Handle fiduciary work, including complex trust 1041s
• Review pass-through returns (1065 and 1120S) where they connect to individual planning
• Identify planning opportunities across entity structure, timing, basis, charitable vehicles, retirement and estate coordination
• Mentor and review the work of preparers and seniors
• Serve as the trusted point of contact clients call before they make a decision, not after

What you need

• 7+ years of tax experience, or 5+ years if that experience was individual tax at a Big 4 firm
• CPA or EA license
• Deep high net worth individual experience: multi-state, complicated K-1s, and the situations that come with significant wealth
• Demonstrated planning ability. Be ready to walk us through strategies you built and what they saved
• Strong client-facing communication. You can explain a complicated recommendation to a non-accountant and get a decision out of the room

Nice to have

• Complex trust and estate 1041 experience (this one moves the needle for us)
• 1065 and 1120S preparation and review
• Experience in a firm where you helped build something rather than inherited a process

Our stack

Lacerte, SurePrep, and Truss. If you already know them, you will be productive in week one. If you do not, they are learnable and we will get you there.

How we work

We extend everyone by default. That is a deliberate operating choice, not a scramble in April. Deadlines do not manufacture fake emergencies here, and the work gets done well rather than fast.

• 50 hours per week is the ceiling in busy season, defined as 2/15 to 4/15 and 8/15 to 10/15. Not an average we quietly exceed. When the work outgrows the calendar, we add capacity. We do not add hours.
• To be clear about what that is and is not: it is a floor under your life, not a ceiling on your ambition. If you want to build something here, nobody will stop you from putting in more. The difference is that the extra goes into your book and your clients, not into cleaning up a fire drill someone else started.
• 3 days in office, 2 days remote each week, subject to client meetings. The client relationships and the work itself are better in person, and we are honest about that up front. During busy season we flex further toward remote, because 2/15 to 4/15 is heads-down production work rather than planning meetings.
• Generous PTO in the slow season, when you can actually take it.

Compensation

Base salary of $130,000 to $165,000 depending on experience, licensure, and planning depth, plus a performance bonus.

We also offer something most firms do not. Multiple compensation structures are available, including revenue participation for the clients you bring in, and a path to build and own a book of business inside our firm that you can take with you in the future. Subject to proper licensing, there is also opportunity to participate in revenue generated across other AlphaTrust Advisors service lines.

We are happy to walk through those models with serious candidates. If you have entrepreneurial ambition and have been looking for a place to build without starting from zero, bring it up early in the conversation.

AlphaTrust Advisors is an equal opportunity employer.