Trusts and Estates Operations Associate

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. We have built our firm to be the trusted advisory platform we wish we had as we navigated some of the most complex and consequential financial decisions of our lives.

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

The Role

SBM's Trusts & Estates practice is built on a promise most firms can't make: that clients get both proactive, strategic advisory counsel and hands-on administration from a single, tightly coordinated team. Our T&E team is focused on building the operating backbone that makes our impressive growth possible, and we're looking for a partner in helping improve, maintain, and support our T&E processes and advisors.

We're hiring a Trusts & Estates Operations Associate to be the first fully dedicated partner to our T&E advisors, who will support trust and estate execution: the transactions, filings, trackers, and client files so our advisors can spend their time fully focused on proactive client strategy and relationships.

What You’ll Do

• Draft trust certifications and other core filings, and maintain current trust terms and officeholder records in real time
• Prepare gift tax returns and maintain complete, audit-ready binders for every transaction and filing, and track remaining exemption amounts as transactions and life events occur
• Sharpen the operational workflow: identify open items in a client's file, coordinate fixes, and close loose ends before they become problems
• Prepare and maintain client calendars for any annual and quarterly requirements
• Draft notes and straightforward legal and operational documents, prepare summaries of documents for attorney review, and assemble materials for client meetings and time-sensitive email responses
• Form entities end to end from EINs, LLC formation, etc.
• Own client onboarding to Riviera, our financial technology platform built to be the command center for family wealth, and ongoing record maintenance, keeping control copies and client files organized and complete
• Interface directly with attorneys, paralegals, and EAs at outside firms and other service providers, serving as a primary point of contact on transaction-and gift-level details

Transactions & Planning Execution

• Coordinate execution and document logistics for trust funding, gifting, and other planning transactions, including retitling of assets
• Track loans and payments, coordinate and docket important dates, and maintain the department's system of annual reminders, including exclusion gifts, trust funding deadlines, valuation requirements, and insurance premiums
• Maintain gifting trackers

Who You Are

You jump in and have a strong bias to action, seeing what needs doing and taking it on. You want to build things, not just execute tasks, and you're inventive, drawn to the harder problem of designing something better. You…