Staff Technical Account Manager

About the role

The Staff Technical Account Manager is a critical member of Avalara’s support organization, responsible for managing technical tickets, ensuring timely resolution, and driving customer satisfaction for our Enterprise customers. This role focuses on complex product and connector issues that cannot be fully resolved through frontline troubleshooting, while improving the speed, quality, and consistency of engineering engagement.

This engineering-aligned support role reduces time to resolution, improves case quality, raises the standard of Jira submissions, and turns repeat issues into durable knowledge and process improvements. It also embeds AI into technical support to improve investigation speed, communication quality, and team scalability.

The role enables better customer experience, faster and more reliable resolution of complex cases, better use of engineering capacity, stronger support scalability, and fewer repeat incidents over time. By combining technical judgment with thoughtful AI adoption, this role helps Avalara improve how support work is performed, not just how individual cases are resolved.

Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and mentorship to TAMs through knowledge sessions, brown-bag training, and advanced troubleshooting of APIs and ERPs.
• Own a portfolio of Avalara’s Enterprise customers with premium support entitlement.
• Own complex support cases from assignment through verified resolution, especially where advanced troubleshooting, reproduction, deep product analysis, or engineering coordination is required.
• Perform advanced troubleshooting and root cause analysis across ERP/CRM/eCommerce platforms (NetSuite, D365, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Shopify, Workday, etc.).
• Diagnose customer issues across AvaTax, connectors, and related workflows by reproducing issues, gathering diagnostics, isolating scope, documenting findings, and confirming business impact.
• Determine when engineering involvement is warranted and ensure Jira tickets are necessary, complete, technically credible, and supported by strong due diligence before submission.
• Create, refine, and manage Jira tickets that clearly describe the issue, expected and actual behavior, troubleshooting completed, reproduction detail, supporting evidence, and urgency.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to drive defect resolution, maintain momentum on linked development work, and keep customer cases moving while internal work is in progress.
• Maintain strong customer communication discipline by meeting milestone expectations, providing proactive updates, responding quickly to new customer messages, and keeping status and documentation audit-ready.
• Improve support effectiveness beyond the individual case by completing troubleshooting and analysis on major or repeat issues and contributing knowledge articles, playbooks, or reusable troubleshooting guidance that reduce repeat volume.
• Contribute to high-priority support or production-support responsiveness by providing fast technical guidance, validating escalation paths, and helping the broader support organization make better decisions earlier in the case lifecycle.
• Act as a technical role model for quality, ownership, and judgment in how cases are investigated, escalated, documented, and resolved.
• Contribute to responsible AI adoption by using sound judgment, validating outputs, and ensuring that final recommendations, communications, and actions remain accurate and customer-ready.
• Help embed AI into support ways of working by sharing effective use cases, improving repeatable practices, and supporting continuous improvement across the team.

12-Month Success Signals

• Consistently meets or exceeds SLA targets and maintains high CSAT scores.
• Reduces complex escalation backlog and improves average resolution time.
• Contributes documented root-cause fixes that decrease repeat incidents.
• Delivers measurable efficiency gains through AI-assisted workflows (e.g., reduced case handling time, improved documentation speed).

Requirements

• Raise the bar for the team by providing guidance, improving execution quality, and leaving cases, routing, and knowledge resources better than you found them.
• Own complex cases end-to-end by driving the issue forward, clarifying ambiguity, following up proactively, and ensuring cases do not stall waiting on others.
• Identify and drive resolution of recurring product defects, resulting in improved customer experience and reduced support volume.
• Consistently achieve high customer satisfaction scores through effective issue ownership, technical expertise, and proactive communication.
• Reduce critical issue resolution time to 5 days through structured root cause analysis and cross-functional collaboration.

AI Bar Raiser Expectations

• Leverage AI-powered tools to accelerate root cause analysis and reduce troubleshooting time for complex customer issues.
• Identify and implement new AI-driven approaches to technical support (e.g., automated diagnostics, intelligent case triage, predictive risk identification) that go beyond current team practices.
• Utilize Generative AI to create knowledge base articles, troubleshooting guides, and customer-facing documentation, improving knowledge accessibility and consistency.
• Develop AI-driven workflows that automate repetitive support tasks, increasing team productivity and reducing manual effort.
• Create AI-powered prompt libraries and support playbooks that standardize troubleshooting approaches across the team.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to integrate AI-driven customer feedback analysis into product improvement initiatives.
• Champion AI adoption across the support organization, driving measurable improvements in resolution efficiency and support quality.
• Use AI insights to prioritize critical customer issues based on business impact, severity, and historical trends.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, IT, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience in advanced technical/production support.
• 7+ years of proven experience in handling complex technical issues in SaaS, APIs, integrations, or similar environments, with strong troubleshooting and root cause analysis skills.
• Expert experience with ERP/CRM/eCommerce platforms: NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP S/4 Hana, SageX, Salesforce, Magento, Oracle, Shopify, Workday, or similar systems is required.
• Demonstrated proficiency in API and workflow analysis across ERP, e-Commerce, and Marketplace platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with Engineering/Product teams and manage high-quality escalation artifacts (e.g., Jira) with clear technical detail.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in SLA-driven support environments using tools such as Salesforce, Jira, and Confluence.
• Mandatory experience using AI tools and automation to improve support efficiency, diagnostics, communication quality, and scalability.

Avalara as 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 in an AI-first environment.
• 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.

Benefits

• Total Rewards: Competitive compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave. Many employees are eligible for bonuses.
• Health & Wellness: Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.
• Inclusive culture and diversity: Strong support for diversity, equity, and inclusion, integrated into business practices and organizational culture. Eight employee-run resource groups with senior leadership and executive sponsorship.

About Avalara

Avalara is defining the relationship between tax and tech, building an industry-leading cloud compliance platform that processes over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. As a billion-dollar business, we’re focused on growth and innovation, aiming to be part of every transaction in the world. Our culture is bright, innovative, and disruptive, reflected in our signature orange branding that captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset.