Principal Software Engineer

Role Description

Avalara is modernizing its global registration, licensing, and compliance platforms to make complex tax and regulatory work faster, more scalable, and easier for customers to navigate. As Principal Engineer, you will lead the architecture for cloud-native, compliance-critical platforms that support automation, workflow orchestration, intelligent decisioning, and reusable shared services. You will work across product, engineering, operations, and design to turn business strategy into reliable platform capabilities with measurable customer and operational impact. You will report to the VP of Engineering. This is a fully remote role.

Responsibilities

• Shape architecture for a cloud-native, jurisdiction-aware platform supporting global registration, licensing, and compliance services.
• Lead modernization work that consolidates shared capabilities, decouples user experiences, and improves platform scalability.
• Architect rules engines, decision systems, and workflow orchestration for long-running compliance operations.
• Design systems that use AI-assisted automation responsibly, with human oversight, explainability, auditability, privacy, and operational control.
• Establish scalable data models, governance strategies, and integration patterns for complex regulatory and licensing data.
• Partner with product, engineering, operations, and design teams to deliver platform capabilities that improve customer outcomes.
• Set standards for performance, reliability, security, observability, resiliency, and operational excellence.
• Lead architectural reviews, technical strategy discussions, and design decisions across multiple engineering teams.
• Find and address scalability risks, technical debt, reliability concerns, and performance bottlenecks before they affect customers.
• Mentor engineers and promote high standards for ownership, simplification, AI-enabled engineering practices, and long-term platform sustainability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science Engineering.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including enterprise-scale platform architecture, modernization, and distributed cloud-native systems.
• Experience designing, scaling, and operating cloud-native software-as-a-service platforms, including hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services, continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure automation, and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience modernizing legacy or fragmented platforms into scalable shared-service architectures.
• Experience building rules-based, policy-driven, workflow, or compliance-oriented systems that require auditability, traceability, security, privacy, and regulatory control.
• Demonstrated applied AI experience, including responsible use of large language models, agents, intelligent decisioning, or workflow automation to improve engineering, operational, or customer outcomes.

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.

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.