Founding Member Resolution Lead

Collective is on a mission to redefine the way businesses-of-one work. Our technology and team of trusted advisors help members achieve financial independence by taking care of everything from business incorporation to accounting, bookkeeping, tax services, and access to a thriving community, all in one integrated platform.

As Collective grows from about 9,000 to 22,000 members by mid-2027, escalation volume will grow with it.

As the founding Member Resolution Lead, you own every escalated member issue at Collective and the system that resolves them. For our most complex cases, you are the single-threaded owner: you take over the member relationship, calm the situation, set a resolution plan, drive the fix with our accounting and tax teams, represent the member before the IRS or a state when needed, and close the loop. At the same time, you design and implement the system that makes this scale: the taxonomy, the decision rights, the resolution economics model that decides what can be auto-approved, the rules that fast-track small claims, and the root-cause loop that removes the reasons members escalate in the first place.

If you are a CPA or EA who has practiced tax and accounting, has run operations, thinks in systems and models, and stays calm and clear with an upset member or a CEO, this is the role.

What you'll do:

• Own every escalation end to end, from routine fee-waiver and refund requests to complex service failures and cases with legal, regulatory, or reputational exposure.

• Act as the single point of contact for escalated members: listen, explain what happened in plain language, commit to a resolution plan with dates, and deliver it.

• Diagnose tax and accounting failures yourself, set the resolution plan, and direct the back-office fix with Accounting, Tax, and Entity Ops.

• Hold Power of Attorney and represent members before the IRS and state agencies when a case requires it.

• Resolve vendor-caused harm for members, document it, and recover costs from the vendor.

• Build the resolution economics model that weighs payouts against handling cost, retention, and legal or reputational exposure, and use it to set auto-approval thresholds.

• Write the resolution policy and decision-rights matrix: what you decide alone, what needs a second reviewer, and what goes to Legal or executive leadership.

• Specify the rules, routing, and case record that Strategic Operations and Engineering build, and own their performance once live.

• Stand up a single case record and an escalated-member flag, retire Slack channels and direct messages as places where escalations are managed, and set SLAs by lane.

What you'll bring:

• An active CPA license or IRS Enrolled Agent credential, with authority to represent taxpayers before the IRS.

• 8+ years across tax and accounting practice and operations, including hands-on preparation or review of returns and books for small businesses or self-employed clients.

• A track record owning high-stakes client or customer escalations end to end, including cases with financial, legal, or reputational exposure.

• Evidence that you have built a system, not only worked a queue: written policies, decision frameworks, rules or automation, workflows, and dashboards. You can show what you built and what changed because of it.

• Comfort with quantitative modeling such as expected value, thresholds, and cohort analysis. You build your own models in spreadsheets or SQL and explain them to non-specialists.

• A working knowledge of the legal and regulatory side of tax practice: Circular 230, Section 7216, penalty abatement and reasonable cause, notice response, and where a tax question becomes a legal one.

• A calm, warm, and direct manner with upset people. Members mostly want the problem fixed and to feel heard, and you can do both in the same conversation.