Family Office Controller

Companies and investment firms built today are scaling faster than at any time in history, but the founders and investors building the defining businesses of our era face a paradox: the more value they create, the faster the demands and complexity of their own financial lives compound. Santa Barbara Management was founded by a small group of accomplished business builders and investors who lived this problem first-hand and decided to solve it.

To make this vision a reality, we have reimagined the family office experience from first principles, relentlessly questioning industry norms.

At Santa Barbara Management, we engineer wealth for exceptional builders and their families. Our innovative model has been painstakingly designed to deliver a fully-integrated, client-aligned solution that combines investments, tax, trusts and estates, financial operations, and strategic finance under one roof, within one team.

Today, we serve some of the most accomplished founders and investors of our time — and we're just getting started.

The Family Office Controller (FOC) is a new, technical accounting role within SBM's Financial Operations function, reporting to the Director of Financial Operations. Where our Staff Accountants focus on day-to-day household bookkeeping and bill pay, the FOC is our specialist for accounting work that requires deeper technical rigor: investment accounting, fund accounting, foundation accounting, and capital call and distribution administration for the funds, foundations, and other complex entities our families own.

You will work across multiple accounting systems — including Asseta and Quick Books — reconcile capital accounts against fund administrator and custodial data, and partner with Family CFOs, the tax team, and the investment team to make sure this work supports everything downstream of it, from client reporting to tax compliance.

• Own capital account maintenance, allocation of income, gains, losses, and carried interest per governing documents, and reconciliation to fund administrator and custodial data; prepare investor-level reporting in coordination with the Family CFO
• Draft and process capital call and distribution notices, track LP commitments and contributions, and manage wire instructions and funding coordination across fund entities

• Build out the chart of accounts and GL structure for investment and fund entities across Asseta and Quick Books, and lead technical onboarding for complex, multi-entity structures (funds, holding vehicles, foundations)
• Maintain books for private foundation entities, support Form 990-PF preparation, and monitor the 5% minimum distribution requirement, qualifying distributions, and grant tracking

• Provide technical review and escalation support for household bill pay handled by Staff Accountants, catching anything with fund or capital account implications before payment release
• Partner with the tax team, the investment team, and SBM's automation resources to keep chart of accounts design, investor reporting, and workflow automation aligned with the rest of the firm

You have a strong bias to action, and you don't wait for a process to be handed to you: if the reconciliation is messy or the chart of accounts doesn't scale, you're the one who fixes it. You've spent time in fund or investment accounting at a management company, whether as a Controller, an accounting manager, or a fund accountant, and capital accounts, distribution waterfalls, carried interest, and LP/GP economics are second nature to you.

That background isn't required, but hands-on exposure to fund structures is what separates candidates who can build, from those who can only maintain.

You're wired to systematize: you move easily across multiple GL and reporting systems, Asseta and Quick Books included, and you don't take a report at face value until every number ties out. You'd rather build the reconciliation right once than redo it every quarter. Repeatable systems excite you more than one-off fixes, and you're always looking for the AI or automation tool that gets you there…