About TaxTim

Our Story

In March 2011, Evan had a problem. He assumed he could complete his own tax return with confidence and ease. He was wrong. After hours of stress and frustration, he setup a meeting with his friend Marc. Marc knew all about tax and made the process quick and easy. Evan thought "What if I could put Marc's brain in a machine, then put it online, so that everyone could have their very own affordable tax man to help them?"

With initial seed funding from Google and some hard work, the two created TaxTim.

Why Work For Us

We're solving an important problem that affects anyone who works and earns an income. Tax is a bitch. It has to be done, it's stressful, complicated and easy to mess up, costing you a LOT of money. Our solution is unique - we have built a completely scalable, digital tax assistant that provides personalised step-by-step service like a human expert would, but with no human beings involved - it's all automated. In 8 years our team of nine has helped over 7 million people. We love automation and we love helping people finish something they hate.

TurboTax in the US made $1.4 billion from a similar product in 2013. We are aiming for similar success in the African market. Come along for the ride?

Our Culture

We are proud Capetonians and our proximity to the mountain, our casual dress and relaxed vibe reflect it. Our focus is to get work done, so however you do it on whatever schedule is up to you. We are fond of cake - luckily there are two proficient bakers in the company, otherwise Fruit & Veg City is just across the road. Our philosophy is that we do our best every day, enjoy our work, breathe, smile and try to enjoy a healthy work-life balance. Staying strong and contented matters just as much as hitting milestones, KPIs and numerical targets.

We strive to foster a learning environment, so everyone gets their very own Skillshare account to satiate their ravenous minds. Naturally, the dev team comprises of a bunch of geeks & nerds, so we enjoy fiddling with new tech whilst learning from each other, and growing as a team. You can expect many memes and the odd "vim vs nano" and "Laravel vs Symfony" debate.

Our Engineering Processes

First, a bit about our team.

Right now we have three developers - our CTO and co-founder Evan, Head of Development John, and junior dev Jerry. Evan has been coding for over 20 years (since he was 11), but he's a bit of a hacker really. He used Notepad++ for the longest time, and recently made the switch to Ubuntu. Luckily he learned some new skills in 2017 when John arrived, bringing enlightenment. John manages the dev team, and is a leading-edge dev, highly knowledgeable in PHP best practices, design patterns, OOP, KISS, GRASP, DRY and other acronyms. Jerry wowed us with his enthusiasm, willingness to learn, and go-getter attitude; he's since taken to refactoring our mobile apps into progressive web-apps. Tip: Impress us with your framework knowledge then subtly mention how a component you created from scratch has been forked over 1,000 times. BOOM.

That being said, we strive for quality over quantity, adopt a primarily agile approach to project management, and run everything through our staging environment prior to rolling out to production via Bitbucket deployments to our AWS EC2 auto-scaled infrastructure.

Our Hiring Process

1. Initial interview, very standard stuff
2. Ask you to do a custom coding challenge
3. A quick call to discuss your challenge submission
4. Call your references
5. Hire you