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At Solomon, Lee’s move into tax planning continues a pattern of choosing problems that put him closer to both the technology and the people deciding how it should be used.
Solomon was rebuilding its tax-preparation product and preparing for major client pilots when Changhun Lee joined the company in July 2026. His first weeks involved stabilizing those pilots and addressing product gaps, but his role quickly expanded. Solomon has raised more than $17 million in cumulative seed funding as it continues building its tax technology platform. Lee now leads development of Solomon’s tax-planning product as the company moves beyond preparation, while also taking responsibility for technical work across other parts of the platform. The move gave him something he had been deliberately seeking: a shorter distance between identifying a problem, understanding why it matters, and helping decide what should be built.
From the outside, Lee’s career can look like a series of sharp turns. He spent three years at Stripe, moved from financial infrastructure into stablecoins when crypto remained an unpopular bet among many engineers around him, worked inside a battery gigafactory, and then joined Solomon to build technology for tax firms. Lee sees a consistent choice behind those moves. He has tried to place himself where he believes an important problem is developing, particularly when solving it requires understanding more than the technology alone.
“I want to understand the engineering, but I also want to understand why we are making the decision in the first place,” Lee said. “The closer I am to the user and the business, the better decisions I can make about what to build.”
At Solomon, that means spending time close to accounting firms rather than limiting his work to the engineering environment. Lee participates in client workshops and hears accounting partners describe problems directly. Although he is not a CPA, he also prepares complete tax returns on Solomon’s own platform to experience where the work becomes difficult and where the product itself creates friction.
His responsibilities have broadened alongside that exposure. Lee took co-ownership of the Consolidated 1099 vertical and helped build a self-improving accuracy loop that raised summary-to-detail reconciliation accuracy from 68 percent to 99 percent. Newly discovered failure cases can now be identified and addressed within a day rather than being left for a later release cycle. He also owns Solomon’s tax extension calculator, which is live with one client and rolling out to others.
That preference for unfamiliar problems developed over several earlier roles. Lee joined Stripe in 2022 and worked through 2024 on its Money Movement & Storage team, building systems responsible for moving and holding funds. His work included FDIC-eligible Treasury accounts with hourly cash balance tracking and core components of Stripe’s banking-as-a-service migration to Fifth Third Bank, an effort involving approximately 80 engineers across the company.
Lee also helped move his team to an asynchronous RPC architecture after engineers identified that many errors surfacing to upstream teams were temporary failures already being retried internally. The change reduced P99 latency by 300 milliseconds and reduced failure domains by roughly 80 percent. During his Stripe tenure, Lee was promoted from L1 to L2.
In early 2025, Lee transferred to Stripe’s Crypto team. He recalls that many engineers within the company were skeptical about crypto at the time, but he believed stablecoins were becoming important to the future of payments.
“I wanted to work on what I thought could become central next,” Lee said. “Sometimes that means moving before there is broad agreement that the opportunity is real.”
On the Crypto team, Lee became a central engineer on the onboarding system for Stablecoin Treasury. The project required resolving 36 competing requirements across Bridge, the frontend platform team, and compliance under a three-month deadline. Lee ran many of the meetings coordinating those groups. The resulting launch expanded the offering into 101 countries, and he separately built and shipped a feature allowing platforms to enable stablecoin payments for their sub-merchants in under two months.
The experience also clarified what Lee wanted beyond technical scale. At a company the size of Stripe, he could contribute to significant systems without always seeing the business reasoning behind priorities being set several organizational levels above him. He wanted greater proximity to the people using a product and to the decisions determining where it should go.
A 2026 engagement with BCG X gave Lee another setting in which to work directly with an unfamiliar operating problem. Inside a battery gigafactory in Poland, he worked on a multi-agent system using manufacturing data for predictive modeling, real-time alerting, root cause analysis, and parameter optimization. Lee focused most directly on a model designed to predict machine jamming events. It achieved an AUROC of approximately 0.8 and predicted jamming about 30 times better than a random model.
Lee traces part of his current approach to an earlier entrepreneurial experience. At 21, he cofounded Flexity, a land profitability analysis platform for real estate buyers, and took a semester away from college to work on it. The startup did not succeed. Lee now thinks one of his limitations was understanding that the product could save experts time without understanding deeply enough how it should change the way they worked.
“My first startup taught me that saying something will make a user faster is not a product vision,” Lee said. “You have to understand the work closely enough to know what should actually be different.”
That lesson now shows up in Lee’s work at Solomon. The technical problems remain important, but he increasingly chooses work that gives him enough access to customers and business decisions to understand the problem behind the code. Preparing tax returns himself is one expression of that approach. Leading a planning product before its shape is fully determined is another.
Lee’s career has moved through financial infrastructure, stablecoins, industrial AI, and tax technology, but the pattern is less about changing industries than changing his proximity to the problem. At Solomon, he is closer to the accountants using the systems he builds and to the decisions about what those systems should become. For Lee, that has increasingly become part of the engineering work itself.