Architect

avalara; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Tryavalara is looking for a Software Architect to define and guide the architecture for its Avalara Tax Research platform. This role will shape how the platform scales and integrates various data and AI capabilities, driving efficient product delivery and better operational performance.

The ideal candidate should have over 10 years of relevant experience in SaaS systems, cloud architecture, and a strong foundation in both software engineering and AI product integration. Benefits include competitive compensation, health coverage, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant work experience in software architecture.
• Experience with cloud-native platforms and distributed architectures.
• Strong communication skills, able to influence across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the architecture for ATR across all layers.
• Define scalable cloud architecture patterns.
• Drive decisions on service boundaries and APIs.

Skills

Cloud-based architecture

API design

SaaS systems design

Performance engineering

AI product architectures

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or Engineering

Job description

What You’ll Do

We are looking for a Software Architect to define and drive the next stage of architecture for Avalara Tax Research (ATR), Avalara’s self-service tax research platform for rules, rates, taxability insights, and AI-assisted research experiences. This role exists because ATR is expanding across indirect tax, direct tax, and trade-related research while also evolving AI-powered experiences through Avi and emerging MCP and AI agent patterns.

The architect in this role will shape how ATR scales across product, platform, data, and AI-enabled experiences so the business can move faster without compromising reliability, trust, security, or performance. A successful candidate will combine deep software architecture expertise with strong product judgment, driving long-range architecture, making pragmatic technology decisions, improving developer velocity, and ensuring ATR can operate securely and reliably at scale.

How This Role Elevates Avalara

Team

This role elevates the team by creating stronger platform patterns, clearer technical direction, and better engineering leverage across ATR. The architect will reduce accidental complexity, address technical debt, improve design quality, and raise the technical bar for engineers and technical leads through coaching, architecture reviews, and reference patterns.

Business

This role elevates the business by enabling ATR to scale in a way that supports faster product delivery, better operational rigor, and a stronger AI-first platform foundation for ATR.

Customer

This role elevates the customer experience by improving the speed, reliability, and trustworthiness of ATR experiences that deliver tax answers, research workflows, and citation-backed insights. Better architecture should translate directly into more resilient user journeys, stronger performance, and faster access to high-confidence research outcomes.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Own and evolve the end-to-end architecture for ATR across application, data, integration, and platform layers.
• Define scalable, secure, cloud-based architecture patterns for search, retrieval, content delivery, AI-assisted experiences, and export or sharing workflows.
• Translate product strategy and business priorities into architecture roadmaps, technical investment areas, and phased execution plans.
• Drive decisions on service boundaries, APIs, event-driven patterns, and platform interfaces that improve delivery speed and long-term maintainability.
• Lead architecture for AI-native ATR capabilities, including grounded retrieval, citation-backed answer generation, MCP and AI agent access patterns, caching, proxying, and observability.
• Establish architectural guardrails for security, privacy, compliance, resiliency, tenancy, and data governance in partnership with Security and SRE.
• Improve developer leverage by standardizing reusable patterns, reference implementations, and design review practices.
• Partner with tax domain stakeholders to make expert-curated tax content easier to ingest, model, retrieve, and serve with high trust.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads, raising architectural and engineering maturity across the ATR organization.
• Guide proof-of-concepts, production-readiness decisions, and major architecture tradeoffs in areas that materially affect scale, reliability, or time to market.
• Drive measurable improvements in platform reliability, latency, and engineering delivery speed.

12-Month Success Signals

• ATR platform reliability improves through clearer service boundaries, stronger observability, and reduced operational ambiguity across critical user journeys.
• Key ATR experiences show measurable gains in reducing complexity in the architecture.
• Engineering teams deliver faster because common architecture patterns, shared services, and decision frameworks are better defined and easier to reuse.
• Production-readiness quality improves through stronger non-functional design standards covering security, performance, resiliency, and operability.
• The ATR organization has a clearer long-range architectural path that supports future growth without slowing current delivery.

AI Expectations

• Designing AI-enabled architecture that improves retrieval quality, answer grounding, citation fidelity, and platform trust.
• Applying AI responsibly and securely, in architecture decisions, including governance, access control, and risk-aware design.
• Using AI to accelerate technical analysis, architecture exploration, and engineering productivity in ways that improve outcomes rather than convenience alone.
• Identifying AI opportunities that improve customer experience, engineering leverage, operational efficiency, or product scale.
• Raising the AI capability of the broader engineering organization by sharing effective patterns and practical best practices.

What You’ll Need to be Successful

• B.S. in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of relevant work experience aligned to the scope and level of this role.
• Significant experience designing and evolving SaaS systems in production.
• Proven success as a Staff+ Engineer, Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent technical leader for business-critical platforms.
• Deep experience with cloud-based service-oriented and distributed architectures, API design, asynchronous systems, and cloud-native platforms.
• Strong understanding of search, retrieval, content-centric systems, metadata-driven architectures, and data modeling for complex domains.
• Experience designing secure, highly observable systems with strong operational characteristics.
• Experience with performance engineering, scalability planning, reliability patterns, and graceful degradation strategies.
• Strong understanding of application security, identity, authorization, secrets management, and secure partner-facing integrations.
• Demonstrated applied AI experience with AI-enabled product architectures, including retrieval-augmented systems, grounding and citations, prompt orchestration, model integration patterns, MCPs, and AI agents.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence across engineering, product, and executive stakeholders.
• Strong judgment in balancing long-term architectural health with near-term product delivery.

Bar Raiser Expectations

• Drive the ATR platform, engineering practices, and technical decisions stronger than they found them.
• Raise the performance of others through coaching, feedback, and technical example.
• Challenge assumptions respectfully and bring data into architectural tradeoff discussions.
• Simplify complexity in ways that improve execution rigor and engineering leverage.
• Hold a high standard for accountability to outcomes, not just activity.

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 executive sponsorship.

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.