Machine Learning Engineer IV

Role Description

AI is transforming how Avalara builds products, automates compliance workflows, and delivers intelligent experiences at scale. As we advance toward our mission of being part of every transaction in the world, our AI and ML teams are building applied AI systems that can understand complex text, documents, products, and compliance data.

In this role, reporting to the Sr Manager, Machine Learning, you will join our AI and ML team to help turn cutting-edge AI techniques into reliable, secure, and scalable systems. You will play a key part in improving automation quality, product capabilities, and developer velocity by building intelligent systems that move beyond prototypes into real-world production impact. If you want to work on production-grade AI systems that raise the engineering bar across the company, Avalara is an amazing place to build your career.

#LI-Remote

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and improve production ML systems for classification, document understanding, retrieval, and AI-powered automation.
• Fine-tune and evaluate transformer-based models, small language models, and other ML approaches for practical business use cases.
• Build and optimize real-time inference services, batch-processing pipelines, APIs, and model-serving workflows.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, accuracy, latency, reliability, cost, and failure modes.
• Contribute to GenAI platform capabilities such as RAG, embeddings, prompt systems, document ingestion, and agent workflows.
• Productionize ML and LLM-powered services with strong reliability, observability, security, and cost controls.
• Mentor junior engineers and help raise team capability in applied AI and production ML practices.
• Raise the technical quality and production maturity of AI and ML systems by bringing rigor to how models are evaluated, monitored, and improved.

Qualifications

• B.E. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 6+ years of experience in machine learning engineering, applied ML, NLP, information retrieval, GenAI, or production AI systems.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python and experience building backend services, APIs, or distributed systems.
• Experience building, evaluating, and deploying ML models in production environments.
• Experience with modern ML or AI techniques such as text classification, transformers, embeddings, RAG, LLMs, SLMs, or document AI.
• Familiarity with model serving, batch and real-time inference, monitoring, observability, and cloud-native deployment.
• Ability to work across ambiguous business and technical problems and convert them into measurable ML improvements.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and domain stakeholders.

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 have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.

Company Description

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.