Job Description

What You'll Do

We are looking for a Software Architect to define and drive the next stage of architecture for Avalara Tax Research (ATR), Avalara’s self-service tax research platform for rules, rates, taxability insights, and AI-assisted research experiences. This role exists now because ATR is expanding across indirect tax, direct tax, and trade-related research while also evolving AI-powered experiences through Avi and emerging MCP and AI agent patterns.

The architect in this role will shape how ATR scales across product, platform, data, and AI-enabled experiences so the business can move faster without compromising reliability, trust, security, or performance. A successful candidate will combine deep software architecture expertise with strong product judgment. They should be comfortable driving long-range architecture, making pragmatic technology decisions, improving developer velocity, and ensuring ATR can operate securely and reliably at scale as the platform grows.

How This Role Elevates Avalara

Team

This role elevates the team by creating stronger platform patterns, clearer technical direction, and better engineering leverage across ATR. The architect will reduce accidental complexity, address technical debt, improve design quality, and raise the technical bar for engineers and technical leads through coaching, architecture reviews, and reference patterns.

Business

This role elevates the business by enabling ATR to scale in a way that supports faster product delivery, better operational rigor, and a stronger AI-first platform foundation for ATR.

Customer

This role elevates the customer experience by improving the speed, reliability, and trustworthiness of ATR experiences that deliver tax answers, research workflows, and citation-backed insights. Better architecture should translate directly into more resilient user journeys, stronger performance, and faster access to high-confidence research outcomes.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Own and evolve the end-to-end architecture for ATR across application, data, integration, and platform layers.
• Define scalable, secure, cloud-based architecture patterns for search, retrieval, content delivery, AI-assisted experiences, and export or sharing workflows.
• Translate product strategy and business priorities into architecture roadmaps, technical investment areas, and phased execution plans.
• Drive decisions on service boundaries, APIs, event-driven patterns, and platform interfaces that improve delivery speed and long-term maintainability.
• Lead architecture for AI-native ATR capabilities, including grounded retrieval, citation-backed answer generation, MCP and AI agent access patterns, caching, proxying, and observability.
• Establish architectural guardrails for security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, tenancy, and data governance in partnership with Security and SRE.
• Improve developer leverage by standardizing reusable patterns, reference implementations, and design review practices.
• Partner with tax domain stakeholders to make expert-curated tax content easier to ingest, model, retrieve, and serve with high trust.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads, raising architectural and engineering maturity across the ATR organization.
• Guide proof-of-concepts, production-readiness decisions, and major architecture tradeoffs in areas that materially affect scale, reliability, or time to market.
• Drive measurable improvements in platform reliability, latency, and engineering delivery speed.

12-Month Success Signals

• ATR platform reliability improves through clearer service boundaries, stronger observability, and reduced operational ambiguity across critical user journeys.
• Key ATR experiences show measurable gains in reducing complexity in the architecture
• Engineering teams deliver faster because common architecture patterns, shared services, and decision frameworks are better defined and easier to reuse.
• Production-readiness quality improves through stronger non-functional design standards covering security, performance, resiliency, and operability.
• The ATR organization has a clearer long-range architectural path that supports future growth without slowing current delivery.

AI Expectations

Avalara’s guidance requires every role to show concrete, role-relevant AI usage that materially improves speed, quality, insight, automation, or scale. In this role, that means:

• Designing AI-enabled architecture that improves retrieval quality, answer grounding, citation fidelity, and platform trust.
• Applying AI responsibly and securely, in architecture decisions, including governance, access control, and risk-aware design.
• Using AI to accelerate technical analysis, architecture exploration, and engineering productivity in ways that improve outcomes rather than convenience alone.
• Identifying AI opportunities that improve customer experience, engineering leverage, operational efficiency, or product scale.
• Raising the AI capability of the broader engineering organization by sharing effective patterns and practical best practices.

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

• B.S. in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of relevant work experience aligned to the scope and level of this role.
• Significant experience designing and evolving SaaS systems in production.
• Proven success as a Staff+ Engineer, Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent technical leader for business-critical platforms.
• Deep experience with cloud-based service-oriented and distributed architectures, API design, asynchronous systems, and cloud-native platforms.
• Strong understanding of search, retrieval, content-centric systems, metadata-driven architectures, and data modeling for complex domains.
• Experience designing secure, highly observable systems with strong operational characteristics.
• Experience with performance engineering, scalability planning, reliability patterns, and graceful degradation strategies.
• Strong understanding of application security, identity, authorization, secrets management, and secure partner-facing integrations.
• Demonstrated applied AI experience with AI-enabled product architectures, including retrieval-augmented systems, grounding and citations, prompt orchestration, model integration patterns, MCPs, and AI agents.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence across engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Strong judgment in balancing long-term architectural health with near-term product delivery.

Bar Raiser Expectations

At Avalara, this role must raise the bar through stronger quality, ownership, judgment, simplification, and measurable business impact. In practice, that means this architect should:

• Drive the ATR platform, engineering practices, and technical decisions stronger than they found them.
• Raise the performance of others through coaching, feedback, and technical example.
• Challenge assumptions respectfully and bring data into architectural tradeoff discussions.
• Simplify complexity in ways that improve execution rigor and engineering leverage.
• Hold a high standard for accountability to outcomes, not just activity.

Avalara is an AI-first Company

AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products. Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability.

• You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here.

• You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers.

• You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.

How We’ll Take Care Of You

Total Rewards

In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.

Health & Wellness
Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.

Inclusive culture and diversity
Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture. We also have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.

What You Need To Know About Avalara

We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech.

We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. Our growth is real - we're a billion dollar business - and we’re not slowing down until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world.

We’re bright, innovative, and disruptive, like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture we’ve designed, that empowers our people to win. We’ve been different from day one. Join us, and your career will be too.

We’re An Equal Opportunity Employer

Supporting diversity and inclusion is a cornerstone of our company — we don’t want people to fit into our culture, but to enrich it. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender, national orientation, disability, sexual orientation, US Veteran status, or any other factor protected by law. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.