What You'll Do
Avalara is an AI-first company. Every engineer is expected to apply AI to improve speed, quality, automation, customer outcomes, and operational scale. AI is embedded into how we build products, operate services, and deliver customer value. Success at Avalara requires using AI as a core engineering capability — not an optional tool.
As a Software Development Engineer, Backend on the Returns team, you will help modernize and scale Avalara’s Returns-as-a-Service (RaaS) ingestion platform that powers tax return preparation, filing workflows, and emerging AI-driven Returns experiences. This role exists to accelerate Avalara’s ability to ingest, validate, normalize, and operationalize increasingly complex tax data at scale while improving reliability, automation, and customer trust.
You will design and deliver scalable backend systems, APIs, ingestion pipelines, and operational tooling that improve filing accuracy, reduce operational friction, and enable faster onboarding of new data sources and filing capabilities. You will partner across engineering, product, operations, and platform teams to build systems that support Avalara’s long-term AI-first Returns strategy.
This role elevates Avalara by improving platform scalability, operational efficiency, and customer outcomes while helping establish engineering and AI practices that raise the performance of the broader organization. Successful candidates will demonstrate Bar Raiser behaviors through strong ownership, engineering rigor, customer focus, and continuous improvement of systems, processes, and team capability.
You will report to the Director of Engineering, Returns-as-a-Service Framework.
This is a remote opportunity. #LI-Remote
This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.
What Your Responsibilities Will Be
- Design, build, and operate scalable ingestion services that process and validate large-scale tax and returns data with high reliability, accuracy, and operational transparency.
- Improve platform scalability, resiliency, and operational performance by reducing defects, strengthening observability, and improving monitoring and troubleshooting workflows.
- Accelerate onboarding of new ingestion workflows and external data sources while improving SLA attainment, processing quality, and customer outcomes.
- Contribute to architecture decisions, API design, secure-by-design engineering practices, automation strategies, and operational tooling that simplify complexity and improve long-term maintainability.
- Apply AI-assisted engineering practices across software development, testing, operational analysis, documentation, troubleshooting, and workflow automation to improve engineering velocity and quality.
- Identify opportunities to use AI to improve ingestion validation, anomaly detection, operational intelligence, and automated issue resolution at scale.
- Partner cross-functionally with Returns, platform, operations, and product teams to deliver automation capabilities that improve filing accuracy, customer experience, and downstream Returns workflows.
- Raise engineering standards through mentorship, technical leadership, code quality improvements, and reduction of technical debt.
- Demonstrate Bar Raiser behaviors by improving systems, processes, execution quality, and the capabilities of those around you.
- Contribute to measurable business outcomes including improved operational efficiency, reduced processing failures, faster onboarding of filing capabilities, and increased customer trust in Returns processing.
12-Month Success Signals
- Reduced ingestion-related operational defects and improved platform reliability metrics.
- Accelerated onboarding timelines for new ingestion workflows and tax data sources.
- Improved observability and operational troubleshooting efficiency across ingestion services.
- Increased automation coverage across validation, monitoring, and operational workflows.
- Demonstrated measurable engineering productivity improvements through effective AI-assisted development practices.
- Positively influenced team engineering standards, code quality, and operational rigor through mentorship and technical leadership.
What You'll Need to be Successful
- B.S. in Computer Science or Engineering.
- 5+ years of relevant experience designing, building, and operating production-grade backend systems and distributed platforms.
- Experience building scalable APIs, ingestion pipelines, data processing systems, and cloud-native services in modern engineering environments.
- Strong experience with C#/.NET and modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, secure development, and reliability engineering.
- Experience operating workloads in AWS, including networking, IAM, observability, security, and cloud operational best practices.
- Demonstrated ability to improve operational excellence through monitoring, troubleshooting, automation, scalability, and defect reduction initiatives.
- Hands-on experience applying AI-assisted development tools and workflows to improve engineering speed, quality, automation, or operational effectiveness.
- Experience integrating with or leveraging generative AI technologies such as OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, or Hugging Face, including practical understanding of prompt design, token optimization, rate limits, and retrieval-based patterns.
- Strong ownership mindset with the ability to simplify complex systems, drive measurable outcomes, and improve the performance of teams and platforms over time.
- Ability to demonstrate applied AI impact through measurable examples tied to engineering efficiency, automation, customer experience, quality improvement, or operational scale.
AI Bar Raiser Expectations
- Demonstrated track record of using AI to drive measurable improvements in engineering productivity, software quality, operational efficiency, customer outcomes, or platform scalability.
- Hands-on experience leveraging AI-assisted development tools and workflows across coding, testing, debugging, documentation, code review, operational analysis, and automation.
- Experience integrating with or leveraging generative AI technologies such as OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, or Hugging Face, including practical understanding of prompt engineering, token optimization, rate limiting, evaluation approaches, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns.
- Ability to identify and implement AI-driven opportunities that reduce manual effort, accelerate delivery, improve data quality, strengthen operational intelligence, or enhance customer experiences.
- Demonstrated judgment in applying AI responsibly, including awareness of data privacy, security, governance, reliability, and accuracy considerations in production systems.
- Ability to quantify AI impact through measurable business or engineering outcomes such as reduced operational costs, faster issue resolution, improved development velocity, increased automation coverage, or higher platform reliability.
- Proven ability to elevate the AI capabilities of peers and teams through mentorship, knowledge sharing, experimentation, and establishment of scalable AI engineering best practices.
- Strong ownership mindset with the ability to simplify complex systems, drive measurable business outcomes, and consistently raise engineering standards across teams and platforms.
- Demonstrated Bar Raiser behaviors through high accountability, strong technical judgment, continuous improvement, and a track record of leaving systems, processes, and teams stronger than they were found.
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.