Lead, People & Culture AI & Excellence

Role Description

The Lead, P&C AI & Excellence role will be the strategic and execution engine for Avalara's AIFirst strategy within People & Culture (P&C). This senior individual contributor serves as the program owner for P&C AI and Excellence. You will translate the P&C AI and automation strategy into execution, providing high impact experiences including those that are manager-facing and employee-facing. You will also deliver cross-platform workflows, such as n8n, Glean, ServiceNow, and Workday.

You will focus on turning P&C priorities into a disciplined AI and automation portfolio:

• Defining problem statements
• Sequencing work
• Governing risks
• Measuring outcomes across manager and employee journeys

You bring deep project/program management experience, practical HR AI application, and experience driving business results. You will report to the Senior Director, People Operations and partner with P&C leadership, P&C functions, PeopleTech/Engineering, Legal, Security, and the central AI/Agentic COE. This is a remote position in the United States.

Responsibilities

• AI portfolio management for P&C
• Own the P&C AI portfolio: maintain a transparent, experience-led roadmap spanning employee journey use cases (onboarding, performance, engagement, exits, etc.) and core P&C operations.
• Identify & prioritize AI opportunities across P&C functions, turning ambiguous ideas into clear problem statements, proposals, MVPs, and phased delivery plans.
• Stand up and run lightweight governance for P&C AI (portfolio management, timeline planning, risk reviews, content governance, sunset decisions) so AI work is sequenced alongside “run the business” obligations and aligned to engineering capacity, always ensuring stakeholder visibility.
• Own end-to-end delivery for key P&C AI initiatives: proposals, project plans, prioritization, stakeholder updates, and postmortems.
• Partner with the central AI/Agentic COE on governance, risk reviews, and data handling for P&C AI solutions.
• Drive enablement and adoption ensuring the primary agent and other AI solutions realize their full potential.
• Serve as a trusted thought partner to P&C teammates on AI: clarify trade-offs, connect AI work to company objectives, and ensure our AI story matches our success metrics.
• P&C agentic product ownership & performance
• Act as product owner for P&C AI (including primary and sub‑agents): define use cases, prompt/decision flows, and escalation logic that span the employee lifecycle from offer accept through exit.
• Own primary agent’s performance, governance, and experience metrics for P&C (e.g., ticket deflection, accuracy, CSAT, SLAs, content quality, etc.).
• Design, monitor, and iterate tests and pilots (A/B tests, controlled rollouts) to improve the primary agent’s effectiveness for employees, managers, and P&C teammates.
• Manage program analytics to quantify impact (time saved, ticket volume reduced, quality of feedback/goals, manager behavior change, org health indicators).
• Partner with Engineering, PeopleTech, and the AI/Agentic COE to shape the primary agent’s architecture for P&C use cases, ensuring a scalable pattern for workflows and agents across tools.
• Help define requirements and patterns for read/write access, service accounts, authorization, and data minimization for P&C AI use cases.

Qualifications

• 6 years of experience in HR, HR technology, product management, program management, or people analytics, with direct experience applying AI/ML in HR or people-related workflows.
• Demonstrated experience owning complex cross-functional programs from idea through adoption, ideally in People/HR or similar domain.
• Strong AI literacy: familiarity with LLMs, agents, prompt and workflow design, evaluation frameworks, and the practical limitations/risks of AI in HR.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills; able to translate technical detail into clear decisions and compelling narratives for executives, HR leaders, and the broader employee base.
• Proven ability to define and track outcome-based metrics and to adjust roadmaps based on measured impact.

Pay Range Details

• Colorado: $126,000-$201,600 (annually)
• Washington: $126,600-$222,800 (annually)
• California: $126,000-$244,000 (annually)
• NYC: $152,600-$244,000 (annually)

The pay range above is the general base pay range for a successful candidate in the state listed. The successful candidate’s actual salary/wage may be based on various factors, such as geographic location, candidate experience and qualifications, as well as market and business considerations. This role is eligible for an annual bonus based on individual and company performance, depending on the terms of the applicable plan and the employee’s role.

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 exec sponsorship.

Company Description

Avalara is 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.