Stock Plan Administrator

Overview

You're the person who makes sure Virta's equity compensation program runs correctly. That means administering stock option grants, tracking vesting schedules, processing exercises, handling tax withholding, and being the go-to person when employees have questions about their equity. You work closely with Finance, HR, Legal, and the external stock plan administrator (likely E*TRADE, Carta, or Schwab).

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage (879 employees suggests Series C/D or later)

Size: 879 employees across employer sales, health plan partnerships, clinical operations

Growth: Large enough to need dedicated stock plan admin, suggesting active hiring and meaningful equity distribution

Market Position: Leader in diabetes reversal through nutrition—competing in a growing metabolic health market

Equity Implications: With this headcount, they're likely managing thousands of option grants, possibly post-409A increases, and preparing equity records for either IPO readiness or acquisition scenarios

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Grant Administration (35%) | Employee Support (25%) | Compliance & Reporting (20%) | System Management (15%) | Ad Hoc Projects (5%)

Key Activities

• Grant Processing: Enter new hire grants, promotion grants, and refresh grants into the system. Verify board approval, check for errors, coordinate effective dates with HR. During grant cycles (usually quarterly), this can consume 50%+ of your time.

• Vesting & Exercise Administration: Process monthly or quarterly vesting schedules. Handle option exercises when employees want to buy their shares—calculate tax withholding, coordinate with payroll, manage cashless exercise mechanics, answer "should I exercise now?" questions (you can't give advice, so you send them to their financial advisor).

• Employee Support: Answer questions via email and Slack. A lot of "What's a strike price?", "When do my options vest?", "What happens to my equity if I leave?", "How do ISOs vs NSOs work for taxes?" You're explaining the same concepts repeatedly to people who've never dealt with equity before.

• Compliance & Reporting: Maintain equity cap table accuracy. Prepare board reports showing option pool usage and dilution. Coordinate with external auditors during year-end. Ensure Section 16 compliance for executives. File Form 3921s and 3922s for tax reporting. Track and report on equity compensation expense for accounting.

• System Management: Keep equity management platform synced with HRIS. Update employee records when people leave, get promoted, or change status. Troubleshoot data discrepancies. Work with IT on system integrations.

• Termination Processing: When employees leave, calculate post-termination exercise periods, send termination notices, process final exercises, handle forfeiture of unvested shares. This requires attention to detail—mistakes here create legal exposure.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Repetitive Explanations: You'll explain the same equity basics over and over. Most employees don't understand the difference between options and RSUs, or why their strike price matters. You can't give tax or financial advice, so you're constantly directing people to "consult your advisor" when they want to know what to do.

• Error Consequences: Mistakes in equity administration can be expensive and legally messy. Wrong strike price, missed vesting dates, incorrect tax withholding—these create real problems. You need to be detail-oriented and triple-check everything.

• Cyclical Workload: Grant cycles and vesting dates create predictable crunches. Month-end and quarter-end are busy. Year-end is intense (tax forms, audit prep, board reporting). You'll have slower periods, but you can't control when things pile up.

• System Limitations: Equity management software isn't always intuitive. You'll spend time working around system quirks, exporting data to Excel to manipulate it, and manually reconciling discrepancies between systems.

• Low Visibility: This is a back-office function. You're critical to keeping equity compensation running, but you're not in high-profile meetings or directly driving revenue. Success means things work smoothly and nobody notices.

What Success Looks Like

• Grants are processed accurately and on time without board approval delays
• Employees get their equity questions answered within 24 hours
• Audit comes back clean with no material findings on equity administration
• Cap table is accurate and reconciled monthly
• Tax filings (3921/3922) are submitted on time with zero errors
• You've documented processes well enough that someone could cover for you during vacation

Who You Support

Internal Stakeholders:

• Finance Leadership: They need accurate equity expense reporting, dilution analysis, and board materials
• HR Team: They need grants processed for new hires and promotions on time
• Legal/Compliance: They need clean records for 409A valuations, board approvals, and potential transactions
• Employees (879 of them): They need help understanding their equity and processing transactions

What They Care About:

• Finance: Accurate cap table, proper expense recognition, audit-ready records
• HR: Fast grant turnaround so they can close candidates, clear communication to employees
• Legal: Compliance with securities law, proper documentation, defensible valuations
• Employees: "When does my stock vest?", "How much is it worth?", "What do I do?"

Requirements

• Stock Plan Experience: You've done this before—likely at least 2-3 years administering equity plans, ideally at a tech or healthcare company with options and RSUs
• CPA or Strong Finance Background: The poster is a CPA, which suggests they value accounting knowledge. Understanding ASC 718, equity compensation accounting, and tax implications (AMT, 83(b), ISO/NSO rules) is important
• Systems Proficiency: Experience with equity management platforms (Carta, Shareworks, Certent, E*TRADE) and ability to work with HRIS systems, Excel for complex reconciliations
• Detail Orientation: You catch errors before they become problems. Equity mistakes are costly and hard to unwind
• Communication Skills: You can explain complex equity concepts in plain English to people who've never dealt with stock options before, and you're patient about explaining the same thing multiple times
• Process Documentation: You document what you do so processes don't live only in your head