Strategic Technical Account Manager

About the Role

The Strategic Technical Account Manager (STAM) supports the retention and growth of Avalara's highest-ARR customers by serving as their primary technical support resource. You will provide expert troubleshooting, proactive technical guidance, and structured engagement to ensure product stability and long-term customer success. The STAM establishes communication and engagement with prospects and guides a preventative support approach that reduces risk and improves customer outcomes. You will also partner during hypercare to provide a smooth transition from implementation to ongoing support.

How This Role Elevates Avalara

Business: The STAM strengthens Avalara's relationships with its highest-value customers by delivering expert technical leadership. By resolving complex issues quickly and preventing recurring risk, you will protect revenue, reduce churn exposure, and strengthen customer confidence in Avalara's platform.

Teams: The STAM improves operational stability and understanding. Through structured feedback to Product and Engineering, you will help identify systemic gaps, influence product improvements, and reduce support burden over time. Engagement and risk identification support retention and expansion strategies in partnership with Customer Account Management.

Customers: The STAM provides a trusted technical partner who understands their environment, anticipates risk, and delivers clarity. This increases platform reliability, improves customer experience, and guides long-term success.

Responsibilities

• Oversee a named portfolio of Avalara's highest-ARR customers, serving as the primary technical support lead and trusted advisor for all post-implementation needs.
• Resolve complex technical issues by leading root cause analysis, coordinating resources, and delivering accurate solutions that minimize customer risk.
• Lead incident response and escalation management, including direct customer communication and internal coordination, ensuring adherence to contractual service level agreements, including a one-hour initial response requirement and any custom service level agreements.
• Promote proactive account engagement through tailored outbound communications, technical health reviews, case trend analysis, and risk assessments to prevent recurring issues and improve platform stability.
• Partner with Customer Account Management to agree on strategies that support retention, expansion, and overall account health.
• Support hypercare transitions from implementation to steady-state support, ensuring continuity and reducing disruption for strategic customers.
• Influence product and engineering teams by providing structured customer feedback and identifying recurring technical gaps that impact customer outcomes.

12-Month Success Signals

• Recognized by assigned enterprise customers as the trusted technical lead and primary escalation point for complex support matters, measured by CSAT scores.
• Meet or exceed contractual service level agreements, including one-hour initial response targets, while maintaining high resolution quality for cases.
• Reduce repeat case volume within the assigned portfolio by identifying and addressing systemic causes.
• Deliver structured health reviews and risk assessments that contribute to measurable improvements in account stability and customer satisfaction.
• Influence at least three product or engineering enhancements that reduce support burden, improve platform reliability, or address recurring customer risk.
• Demonstrate quantifiable AI-driven performance gains, such as faster diagnostics, improved case documentation quality, enhanced knowledge sharing, or automation of recurring technical tasks.

AI Expectations

Avalara is an AI-first company. We expect every engineer and manager to use AI to enhance productivity, quality, innovation, and customer value. We embed AI in our workflows and products — and Avalara requires employees to embrace AI as an essential capability, not an optional tool.

AI Bar Raiser Expectations

• Demonstrate advanced, applied AI expertise by delivering measurable improvements in areas such as incident resolution speed, cause accuracy, case deflection, and customer communication quality.
• Implement new AI-driven approaches to technical support (e.g., automated diagnostics, intelligent case evaluation, predictive risk identification) that go beyond current team practices.
• Measure AI impact through clear metrics (e.g., reduced time to resolution, lower repeat case rates, improved service level agreement adherence, increased automation coverage).
• Improve team capability by sharing AI techniques, coaching peers, and establishing repeatable best practices that improve overall team performance.
• Increase adoption of AI at scale by promoting AI into workflows, documentation, and operational processes—not as optional tools, but as standard ways of working.
• Apply AI usage, ensuring data security, compliance, and responsible application in customer-facing and internal scenarios.
• Assess and grow Avalara's AI within the STAM function, identifying opportunities to increase leverage, reduce manual effort, and improve customer outcomes.

What We Look For

• Improve team performance and standards through coaching, knowledge sharing, and setting a high bar for customer outcomes.
• Ownership for complex customer issues, and modeling this behavior for others.
• Improve processes and documentation.
• Simplify complex technical and compliance challenges in ways that improve both internal execution and customer experience.
• Challenge assumptions constructively and introduce better approaches that increase effectiveness and scalability.
• Leave every team, process, and customer engagement stronger than they found it, contributing to increased talent density and execution thoughtfulness across the organization.

Qualifications

Education: Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or Business.

Experience:

• 5 years of experience in technical account management, customer success, or customer or partner support roles.
• Experience supporting enterprise or high-revenue customers.
• Experience leading complex issue resolution and coordinating teams.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Working knowledge of networking concepts, application programming interfaces, and common enterprise resource planning and eCommerce platform workflows.
• General knowledge of SaaS-based application support models and incident management processes.
• Conduct root cause analysis and translate technical findings into clear customer communication.
• Experience establishing communication and engagement with prospects and the ability to engage technical partners.
• Manage multiple high-priority accounts while meeting defined service level agreements.
• Problem-solving skills in customer situations.

AI at Avalara

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.

Benefits

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 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, showing off the culture we’ve designed that empowers our people to win.