Sr. Software Development Engineer

About the Role

Join Avalara’s engineering team and help shape the future of Avalara. In this role, you'll work on a high-volume tax compliance product used by thousands of customers, contributing to both the evolution of our existing Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL platform and the expansion of new API and user interface capabilities using C# and React. As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll be part of a collaborative, international engineering organization, working closely with a U.S.-based team to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing solutions. You'll leverage modern cloud technologies, CI/CD practices, containerized environments, and AI-powered development workflows to build and enhance customer-facing products.

We're looking for an engineer who enjoys solving complex problems, writing clean and efficient code, and continuously raising the technical bar. Success in this role requires strong collaboration, a growth mindset, and a passion for improving systems, processes, and team effectiveness. You'll have the opportunity to influence architecture, mentor peers, drive operational excellence, and help advance the use of AI to accelerate development, troubleshooting, and innovation across the organization.

This is an excellent opportunity for someone who thrives in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment and wants to make a meaningful impact on a product that plays a critical role in tax and information reporting compliance. We expect every engineer, manager, and lead to use AI to enhance productivity, quality, innovation, and customer value. AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products—success at Avalara requires embracing AI as an essential capability, not an optional tool.

Bar Raiser Expectations

We are hiring a Bar Raiser—someone who elevates the performance, standards, and technical capability of the teams they work with. This role is expected to:

• Strengthen how complex technical issues are resolved by improving execution quality, troubleshooting rigor, and overall team effectiveness.
• Raise standards for technical troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and resolution quality.
• Improve team capability through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and clear documentation.
• Reduce repeat issues by driving systemic fixes and improving diagnostic approaches.
• Strengthen cross-functional execution by improving clarity and collaboration with Engineering and Product.
• Identify opportunities to improve processes, tools, and workflows that increase scalability and efficiency.
• Leave systems, documentation, and team capability stronger than they found them.

AI Expectations

We are hiring an AI Bar Raiser—someone who brings applied AI expertise to improve how technical work is performed. This role is expected to:

• Use AI tools to accelerate development, root cause analysis, summarize case histories, and generate high-quality knowledge base content.
• Identify automation opportunities that reduce manual troubleshooting effort.
• Quantify and demonstrate measurable improvements enabled by AI (e.g., reduced resolution time, improved documentation quality).
• Share AI best practices with peers and contribute to raising AI capability across the team.

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 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable software solutions that support Avalara’s 1099 product suite.
• Deliver high-quality, reliable code to large-scale production environments while adhering to engineering best practices.
• Collaborate with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to define requirements and deliver customer-focused solutions.
• Participate in architecture and design discussions, evaluating trade-offs and recommending scalable, maintainable solutions.
• Optimize application performance, reliability, and operational efficiency through thoughtful design and continuous improvement.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues, leveraging strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Work with relational databases, including designing and optimizing data models and queries in PostgreSQL.
• Contribute to code reviews, technical documentation, and knowledge sharing across the engineering organization.
• Participate actively in Agile development processes, including planning, estimation, and retrospectives.
• Drive innovation by identifying opportunities to improve systems, processes, and developer productivity.
• Mentor and support other engineers while fostering a collaborative and inclusive engineering culture.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in computer science or engineering is required.
• 6+ years of experience in Ruby on Rails or C#.
• Experience publishing and consuming REST APIs.
• Knowledge of building CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Terraform).
• Experience with Cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
• Experience with Docker containers and Kubernetes (K8s), Docker Swarm as an orchestrator platform.
• Experience securing web applications.
• Understanding of scalable systems and low-latency APIs.
• Understanding of engineering for available and fault-tolerant systems.
• Experience communicating updates and resolutions to customers and other partners.

Benefits

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 organizational culture. We have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and executive sponsorship.

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, and shows off the culture we’ve designed to empower our people to win.