AI Engineer

Luca IQ; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Luca IQ is building the modern tax engine and AI-powered workflow to help tax professionals. We are seeking an AI engineer to own the intelligence layer across document collection, extraction, and review, turning messy documents into reliable tax data.

You will design production AI systems, ensure accuracy and traceability, and collaborate with engineers to integrate with a deterministic tax engine. Join a small team delivering real-world impact on tax workflows.

Qualifications

• Experience building robust OCR and extraction systems for documents.
• Ability to design evaluation datasets, ground-truth labels, and scoring.
• Strong judgment on observability, reproducibility, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design workflows to extract data from structured and unstructured documents.
• Route low-confidence results for human review and explain findings clearly.
• Develop agents that review completed returns against source documents and tax context.
• Shape AI experience with confidence metrics, citations, and clear boundaries.
• Build evaluation and reliability systems to measure extraction quality and user outcomes.

Skills

OCR & extraction

LLM-based parsing

Document understanding

Observability

Human-in-the-loop

Evaluation design

Auditability

Tools

PDF processing

OCR tooling

LLM integration

Job description

Path Own the intelligence layer across the tax preparation workflow

The Role

Professional tax preparation begins with a messy set of documents and ends with a return that must be accurate. Luca IQ is building the modern tax engine and application that makes that process faster, more reliable, and easier for tax professionals.

We are looking for an AI engineer to own the intelligence layer across that workflow. You will design and maintain systems that turn documents into usable tax data, help tax professionals identify missing or inconsistent information, and review completed returns before filing.

This is not a role focused on generic chat experiences. You will build production AI systems that operate on real financial documents and work alongside a deterministic tax engine, where accuracy, traceability, and thoughtful human control matter.

The Team

Luca IQ was founded by Angelo Policicchio, a CPA, and Akash Sadashivapeth, who met at Harvard Business School. Our engineering team brings decades of combined experience building deterministic engines for the financial services industry, where accuracy is non-negotiable. We’re building Luca IQ because nearly every tax return prepared by a CPA in America runs through one of a handful of tax engines built in the 1990s, and we’re building the first modern, API-first, IRS-approved engine to replace them.

What You’ll Work On

• Document collection and classification: Build systems that collect client documents and identify what they are, including tax forms, financial statements, receipts, and supporting materials.
• Extraction and normalization: Turn structured and unstructured documents into reliable, usable data. You will design workflows to extract fields, preserve source context, resolve ambiguity, and route low-confidence results for human-in-the-loop review.
• Agentic return review: Build agents that examine a completed return alongside its source documents and relevant tax context. The system should identify missing information, inconsistencies, and potential errors, then explain findings clearly and propose corrections for a tax professional to review.
• The AI experience: Shape how tax professionals understand, trust, and act on AI output. This includes confidence, citations to source documents, review workflows, correction flows, and clear boundaries between suggestions and final decisions.
• Evaluation and reliability: Build the evaluation, observability, and feedback systems needed to measure extraction quality, agent performance, and user outcomes over time.

What We’re Looking For

• Experience building robust document OCR and extraction systems, including working with PDFs, forms, scanned documents, and financial data, and applying modern LLM-based methods for document understanding, parsing, and structured data extraction.
• Experience designing scalable evaluation frameworks that reliably benchmark quality, including defining evaluation datasets, ground-truth labels, scoring methodologies, and statistical analyses for structured and unstructured documents.
• Strong judgment about evaluating design, observability, reproducibility, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• A bias toward shipping and learning from real-world document and model behavior, paired with a high bar for accuracy, auditability, reliability, and actionable measurement.

What Success Looks Like

• In your first 30 days, you’ll understand and optimize the document and return-preparation workflow, ship meaningful improvements, expand extraction coverage, and pinpoint the most time-consuming manual steps where AI can improve accuracy, speed, or consistency.
• By 60 days, you’ll own a production workflow for document classification and extraction with clear quality metrics and a feedback loop from users.
• By 90 days, you’ll have established the foundation for expanding AI across the application into an AI-powered review experience that helps tax professionals catch issues earlier and prepare returns with greater confidence.

How We Work

We are a small team with high ownership and little separation between product and engineering. You’ll work directly with tax professionals, collaborate with engineers building the tax engine and application, and make consequential decisions about how AI becomes part of a new tax platform.