Senior Tax Manager

The role

Core Areas of Responsibility

Tax Compliance Program Oversight

• Run the tax compliance program end to end across the families’ entities, trusts, and individual returns. They own the calendar, the workflow, and the overall integrity of the program (not preparing returns; that work sits with third-party CPA firms)
• Serve as the single point of coordination to the CPA firms; routing key tax information and inputs so the preparers have what they need, when they need it
• Manage the CPA firms’ timelines, deliverables, and quality; hold them accountable to deadlines and standards
• Review work product and returns; issue-spot, ask the right questions, and escalate, catching problems before they become filings
• Sit at the intersection of the family’s underlying fund interests, the family office’s diversified investment portfolio, and personal investments and life events - connecting the dots across sources that outsourced advisors do not
• Partner with the CFO and in-house counsel on the tax structuring of new investments
• Build process and leverage technology to make the program more efficient, reliable, and less dependent on any one person’s memory year-over-year

Institutional Knowledge

• Own and centralize a fragmented body of knowledge: the families’ trusts, wills, estate plans, entities, and how they interrelate. Improve documentation to be more current, reliable, and retrievable
• Serve as the reliable internal reference point for how the structures work, so that the answer or the right person to call is already known
• Maintain a comprehensive view across generations and family members

Ownership of Complex Family Matters (Special Projects)

• Act as project owner from intake through resolution for urgent, episodic, multi-step matters that do not fit standard back-office workflows
• Convert open-ended requests into a plan with clear ownership, deadlines, and a defined path to completion
• Coordinate with outside advisors (attorneys, insurance agents, real estate and other professionals) with clear accountability, and leverage junior internal resources for execution rather than doing everything personally
• Sprint up the learning curve on novel, specialized matters. Run the engagement and drive to a close.
• Build the playbook where none exists

Internal Coordination and Escalation

• Work closely with the CFO, in-house counsel, the CPA firms, and the investment team to ensure matters are handled with the right expertise and appropriate urgency
• Identify when a matter intersects with finance, legal, tax, or risk considerations and escalate thoughtfully
• Provide clear, concise status to the CFO, family members, and senior leadership

Examples of Matters You Will Own

• Illustrative and non-exhaustive. The tax compliance program is the cyclical core; the special projects are episodic. Both call for an owner who can scope, coordinate the right people, and drive to completion.
• Annual compliance cycle across the families’ entities, trusts, and individual returns - coordinating multiple CPA firms, tracking deliverables, and reviewing returns before filing
• Tax structuring input on new investments, in partnership with the CFO and in-house counsel
• Ongoing maintenance of the families’ estate plans, including updates to wills, trusts, and beneficiaries
• Trust distributions, loans to beneficiaries, and related administrative processes
• Private Placement Life Insurance policy administration and coordination with outside agents
• Family member relocations, including multi-jurisdictional tax and legal coordination
• Prenuptial agreements and related legal coordination; large asset purchases and sales

A day in the role

Your work will center on tax compliance and private tax for high net worth individuals and families. You will focus on the tax needs of an ultra high net worth family within a multi-billion-dollar family office.

What you bring

Required

• The Profile in One Line
• Someone who oversees the tax compliance program without preparing the returns; who manages the experts but is not the expert; who owns outcomes rather than executing tasks; and who builds the playbook where none exists.
• Experience
• This is an excellent move for someone with a strong tax background who is ready to step out of pure preparation and the busy-season grind, and who wants a broader, more comprehensive understanding of how ultra-high-net-worth families and their estates are supported
• Enough tax fluency to route inputs intelligently, review returns critically, and spot issues
• Demonstrated experience managing complex, multi-party work with competing priorities and time-sensitive deadlines
• Exposure to pass-through structures, trusts, and multi-entity, multi-jurisdiction compliance is valuable; broader exposure to UHNW family dynamics and estate structures is a strong plus
• Skills and Attributes
• Exceptional judgment and common sense: able to read a situation, determine the right course of action, and act without waiting to be told
• Ownership instinct: owns the process and the result, leverages others for execution, and does not need to be handed a playbook
• Builder’s mindset: comfortable standing up frameworks, checklists, systems, and technology

Nice to have

• Roughly 8–12 years, with a tax foundation. For example, private client / high-net-worth tax at a Big Four or national firm, asset management or fund tax, family office tax, or a CPA firm serving ultra-high-net-worth families. A CPA is a plus but not required.

Meet most of these but not every one? Apply anyway. A recruiter looks at your whole background.

The package

• Base salary: $175K-$200K
• Annual bonus

The firm

This is a confidential search, so the firm is described rather than named. JSB shares the name in a first conversation.

Multi-billion-dollar family office serving two families through a private trust company structure.