Senior Accounting Manager

Laya is a modern accounting, tax, and advisory firm for businesses that want predictable monthly closes, decision-ready reporting, and a clear path from accounting to tax and advisory. We pair licensed experts with technology we build ourselves, and we run industry-specific playbooks — from startups and agencies to restaurants, retail, and professional services — so our clients' books reflect how their business actually works. We are a distributed team, working across the US, India, Latin America, and the Philippines.

Our product is financial truth, so we hire and retain against four values. They are ordered from least trainable to most trainable, and when two of them collide, the higher one wins.

• Integrity. Always doing the right thing and owning your actions — not situational, and not dependent on whether anyone is watching. The numbers are what the numbers are. Mistakes surface immediately and travel upward, and we own our decisions in writing.
• Talent. The raw ability to reason through a problem you have never seen before and to take on new domains quickly. We hold a high bar and would rather leave a seat open than fill it below that bar — and we owe real development to everyone who clears it.
• Grit. Doing whatever it takes to deliver an outcome you have claimed as yours. Setbacks produce a next step, not an explanation, and the unglamorous work gets the same commitment as the interesting work.
• Expertise. The judgment that comes from having seen the work — many clients, many edge cases, many closes. It ranks last only because it is the one thing we can build here; the first three you bring with you.

How we work follows from that. We define the outcome before the work starts — what "done" means, by when, and who owns it. We turn everything we do repeatedly into written process, because a process that lives in one person's head is a liability, not an asset. And we delight clients through the absence of surprise: reliability, proactivity, and clarity, always inside scope.

Everyone here is measured on the same three dimensions they were hired against — Reasoning, Process, and Communication.

You will lead Laya's accounting delivery team — Senior Accountants and Client Success Associates working across India, Latin America, and the Philippines — and own the quality and timeliness of everything that reaches our US clients each month.

This is a build role rather than a maintenance one. The team is growing and much of the process is still being written. You will be the person who decides what "done" looks like for a close, writes it down well enough that anyone can execute it, and then holds the line on it. You report to the CEO and work as a peer to the rest of Laya's leadership.

A successful first year looks like this: every client close lands on the date we promised, the playbooks your team runs are written well enough that a new hire can execute them without shadowing anyone, and problems reach you — and the client — before they become surprises.

Lead the team

• Lead, mentor, and develop a distributed team of Senior Accountants and Client Success Associates; set expectations specific enough to be met and give feedback direct enough to be useful.
• Hire against Laya's bar. We would rather leave a seat open than fill it below the bar — and we owe real development to everyone who clears it.
• Assess your people on Reasoning, Process, and Communication, the same three dimensions they were hired against.

Own delivery

• Own the quality and timeliness of monthly close, tax, payroll, and advisory deliverables across the client book.
• Drive complex accounting issues and client escalations to resolution, and make sure difficult news reaches the client the day you know it.
• Review with rigor: catch what the software does not, and know which discrepancies are immaterial and which ones signal a structural problem.

Build the process

• Turn everything the team does repeatedly into written process, and update the playbook whenever a miss or a client complaint reveals a gap, so the same problem is never solved twice.
• Define the outcome, the owner, and the deadline for every engagement and every handoff before the work starts.
• Monitor close cycle times, quality, and client satisfaction, and act on what they tell you.

Put the tools to work

• Evaluate and deploy AI and automation where they remove rework, and keep human judgment and accountability on every number that reaches a client.
• Partner with Laya's product team. We build our own software, and the friction your team feels is the roadmap.

Help the firm grow

• Contribute to capacity planning, hiring, and training as the firm scales.
• Bring what you learn from clients and from your team back into how Laya operates.

• CA (India), CPA, ACA, or ACCA.
• 8+ years in accounting, including 3+ years leading teams.
• A real track record of developing accountants — people you have managed have gone on to bigger roles.
• Deep knowledge of bookkeeping, financial reporting, and tax compliance. Exposure to US GAAP and US tax is a strong advantage; if you do not have it yet, you will be expected to build it here.
• Clear writing. Most of leading a distributed team happens in writing, and unclear writing becomes someone else's rework.
• Willingness to work a schedule with meaningful daily overlap with US Eastern time.
• Comfort forming your own judgment about new tools, including AI tools — where they help, and where they should not be trusted.

On background. We are calibrating to the kind of accountant the Big 4 produce: review discipline, exposure to many clients and many messes, and the habit of documenting a judgment so that someone else can check it. That is a reference point, not a requirement. We have no interest in a filter that screens out someone who built the same judgment at a firm nobody has heard of — given the choice, we will take the judgment over the logo.

Also useful

• Experience at a startup or growth-stage firm where the process did not exist yet.
• Multi-jurisdictional or US-facing client work.
• Having led a team through a technology or process change that people initially resisted.

USD 2,400 – 3,000 per month, depending on experience. We would rather put the band in the posting than discover a mismatch in the final round.