Lead Software Engineer

What You'll Do

Avalara is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join the Returns team, you will report to a Director of Engineering. You will work remote within the United States ().

This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• You will Develop microservices in a modern stack.
• You will manage the cloud infrastructure: provision, secure, and tune workloads on AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, EventBridge, IAM) and evaluate or integrate other cloud vendors when needed (e.g., Azure OpenAI, GCP Vertex).
• Integrate generative-AI APIs and tooling: prototype, productionize, and monitor features using providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Bedrock; orchestrate prompts/agents via LangChain or bespoke frameworks; enforce data-privacy guardrails.
• Champion engineering best practices: CI/CD with GitHub Actions, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CDK), automated testing, SLO/SLA ownership, and cost optimization.
• Mentor and collaborate: pair on tricky problems, review PRs with empathy, and partner with product, design, and ML teams to ship valuable experiences.

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

• 5+ years building and operating production backend systems.
• 5+ years knowledge of AWS primitives (VPC networking, IAM, security, observability, billing) and experience migrating or operating workloads across multiple cloud providers.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Python, Java) and comfort working full-stack when needed.
• A solid grasp of distributed-systems fundamentals—event-driven design, idempotency, data consistency, graceful degradation, and tracing.
• Hands-on experience calling or hosting generative-AI models (OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, Hugging Face) with understanding of prompt design, token costs, rate limits, and basic RAG patterns.
• Passion for shipping maintainable code: automated testing, code reviews, architectural decision records (ADRs), and clear documentation.

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.