Principal Engineer / Architect

What You'll Do:

Avalara is an AI-first company. We expect every engineer, manager, and to use AI to enhance productivity, quality, innovation, and customer value. AI is embedded in our workflows, and products - and success at Avalara requires embracing AI as an essential capability, not an optional tool. We aspire to be the global cloud compliance platform.

We're hiring a Principal Engineer / Architect — and it's big. Global big.

If you're ready to build systems that power digital trade in 100+ countries, across multiple cloud providers, and support exponential growth, this is your next move.

Why you will matter

The Principal Engineer leads architecture and technical direction for scalable, secure, and high-performing software systems. This role partners with cross-functional teams to translate our goals into sound engineering decisions. The Principal Engineer brings deep technical expertise and provides mentorship across teams to ensure design practices and long-term platform success.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be:

• Architect and evolve a cloud-agnostic platform built for feature-rich services that make business transactions smarter and faster.
• Design for speed, compliance, observability, and operational excellence
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to turn vision into action
• Define and lead software architecture strategy to align with business and technical goals.
• Design complex, scalable, and secure systems that meet performance and reliability standards.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentorship to engineering teams across projects.
• Recommend new technologies, frameworks, and tools to improve engineering outcomes.
• Conduct design and code reviews to uphold architecture standards and quality.
• Resolve system performance bottlenecks and architectural risks.
• Create technical documentation, including diagrams and specifications.
• Promote a culture of innovation, experimentation, and continuous improvement.- Lead AI solution design within product areas, including auto-remediation and predictive analytics.
• Set AI-related coding and security standards; mentor teams on AI tooling.

What You'll Need to be Successful:

You've designed and scaled distributed systems in multi-cloud environments. You don't chase shiny objects - you build for robustness, simplicity, and change. You see complexity and architect clarity.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including full-stack development.
• Expertise in Java or C# programming
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems.
• Experience of architectural patterns and system design best practices.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, AWS cloud services, and DevOps tooling (e.g., Terraform, Docker, and ECS).
• Experience with Agile methodologies, including TDD and BDD. - Experience migrating monolithic applications to microservices or serverless architecture.
• Experience with Enterprise Integration Patterns.

AI-First Capability Requirements: Demonstrated experience using AI tools to accelerate or improve software development processes and Prompt Engineering best practices.

Commitment to learning and applying AI advancements relevant to your domain.

Understanding of responsible AI principles (data privacy, bias mitigation, hallucinations).

Experience applying AI at scale in architecture, product features, or operations.

You will be reporting to the Vice President.

This is a remote position.

#LI-Remote

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.