Salesforce DevOps Release Engineer

Avalara, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonuses

Private medical insurance

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Paid time off

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Avalara seeks an experienced DevOps and Release Engineer to own release management across Salesforce, Boomi, and AWS. You will design and run CI/CD pipelines, coordinate with multiple engineering teams, and implement governance to reduce incidents. This remote role reports to the Senior Manager of Business Technology.

You will drive automation, monitor deployments, and craft runbooks and metrics to improve velocity and reliability across interconnected platforms.

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years in DevOps, release engineering, or similar enterprise roles.
• Hands-on with Salesforce CLI, change sets, and Salesforce metadata deployments.
• Proficiency with GitLab CI/CD and Terraform for provisioning.
• Experience managing releases across Salesforce, Boomi, and AWS.
• Able to troubleshoot deployment failures and coordinate across teams.
• Experience with release governance: approval gates, dependency checks, rollbacks.
• Familiar with AI-assisted deployment tools and automation to improve efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Review and validate deployment requests across Salesforce, Boomi, and AWS.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines using Salesforce CLI, change sets, and GitLab for Salesforce, plus Terraform for AWS.
• Troubleshoot deployment failures and maintain automated rollback procedures.
• Build dashboards to monitor deployment health and performance.
• Enforce release governance, environment promotion criteria, and CAB processes.
• Define deployment metrics and report on frequency, MTTR, and lead times.
• Collaborate with security/compliance teams to meet controls and audits.
• Create runbooks and deployment strategies for cross-team repeatability.

Skills

DevOps

Release engineering

CI/CD

Automation

GitLab CI

Salesforce CLI

Terraform

AWS

Boomi

Security governance

Education

BS in CS/Engineering

Equivalent practical experience

Tools

GitLab

Salesforce CLI

Terraform

AWS

Boomi

Copado

Gearset

Flosum

CloudFormation

CDK

Datadog

Opsgenie

Job description

What You\'ll Do

As a DevOps and Release Engineer, you\'ll lead the release management and deployment pipeline across our Salesforce, Boomi, and AWS environments, ensuring changes move safely and predictably from development through production. You\'ll partner with Salesforce developers, integration engineers, and cloud infrastructure teams to build guardrails that catch breaking changes before they reach customers. This role is critical to reducing production incidents caused by uncoordinated changes across interconnected systems.

This is a remote role reporting to the Senior Manager of Business Technology.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Review and validate Salesforce, Boomi, and AWS deployment requests, ensuring you check change sets for dependency conflicts before promoting them between environments.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines using Salesforce CLI, change sets, and GitLab for Salesforce deployments, alongside Terraform for AWS infrastructure provisioning.
• Troubleshoot deployment failures with engineering teams and maintain automated rollback procedures to minimize production impact.
• Build monitoring dashboards to ensure deployment issues are identified and addressed before they affect customers.
• Establish and enforce release governance standards including approval gates, dependency checks, environment promotion criteria, and change advisory board (CAB) processes.
• Define and report on important deployment metrics — deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and lead time for changes — to improve release performance.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure all deployments meet organizational controls, audit requirements, and regulatory standards.
• Develop runbooks, deployment strategies, and operational documentation to ensure repeatability and knowledge transfer across engineering teams.

What You\'ll Need to be Successful

Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, release engineering, or a similar role supporting enterprise environments
• Hands-on experience with Salesforce CLI, change sets, and Salesforce metadata deployments
• Proficiency with GitLab CI/CD pipelines and Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
• Experience managing release processes across multiple interconnected systems (Salesforce, Boomi, AWS)
• Troubleshoot with the ability to resolve deployment failures
• Collaborate to work with multiple engineering teams
• Experience implementing release governance practices such as approval gates, dependency checks, and rollback procedures
• Experience applying AI-powered tools and automation (e.g., GitHub Copilot, AI-assisted code reviews, or AI-driven testing frameworks) to improve deployment efficiency and reduce manual effort
• Familiarity with Boomi or similar integration platforms and their deployment processes
• Experience with Salesforce DevOps Center or third-party Salesforce release management tools (Copado, Gearset, or Flosum)
• Knowledge of AWS CloudFormation, CDK, or other infrastructure-as-code tooling beyond Terraform
• Exposure to SRE practices, incident management frameworks (e.g., Firehydrant, Opsgenie), and observability platforms (e.g., Datadog, Splunk)
• Relevant certifications such as AWS DevOps Engineer, Salesforce Administrator/Developer, or HashiCorp Terraform Associate

As a Bar Raiser

• You are expected to elevate the organization\'s DevOps and release engineering capabilities, rather than to maintain existing processes. This includes:
  • Hold standards for release quality, deployment reliability, automation across Salesforce, Boomi, and AWS environments.
  • Create a culture of \"automation first\" by eliminating manual deployment activities, reducing operational risk, and improving deployment velocity through scalable CI/CD practices.
  • Use data, operational metrics, and production insights — not assumptions — to improve deployment success rates, release predictability, change failure rates, and recovery times.
  • Simplify complex cross-platform deployment workflows into standardized, repeatable, and release processes that scale with business growth.
  • Establish and improve engineering guardrails, including dependency validation, release governance, automated testing, approval gates, rollback strategies, and deployment observability.
  • Mentor developers, integration engineers, and platform teams on DevOps best practices, release discipline, Infrastructure as Code, and to raise engineering across the organization.
  • Challenge existing deployment practices respectfully and driving continuous improvements that reduce technical debt, improve system reliability, and strengthen collaboration.
  • Stay current with modern DevOps, platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, and AI-assisted engineering capabilities, introducing practical innovations that improve developer productivity while maintaining security and governance.
  • Leave every deployment pipeline, release process, operational framework, and engineering standard stronger and easier to operate than before.
• You will do not simply manage releases — it raises our engineering by improving how software is built, validated, governed, deployed, and operated across interconnected enterprise platforms.

As an AI Bar Raiser

• Avalara is committed to building a workforce that uses artificial intelligence to lead smarter, faster, and more scalable outcomes. Expect to raise the AI capability of our DevOps and release engineering practice:
  • Identify and adopt AI-powered tools that improve deployment pipeline efficiency, such as AI-assisted code review, intelligent test selection, anomaly detection in deployment telemetry, and predictive change risk scoring.
  • Champion the use of AI and automation to eliminate repetitive, error-prone manual release activities. Use tools like GitHub Copilot, AI-assisted runbook generation, or LLM-driven incident summarization to accelerate engineering workflows.
  • Evaluate and pilot new AI-native DevOps capabilities (e.g., AI-powered observability, automated root cause analysis, intelligent rollback triggers) and bring well-reasoned recommendations to the team.
  • Model responsible AI use — applying AI tools with appropriate governance, validating AI-generated outputs, and maintaining human accountability for all production decisions.
  • Mentor peers on practical AI tool usage within the DevOps lifecycle, helping the broader team develop AI fluency and reducing resistance to adopting AI-assisted workflows.
  • Improve for how AI amplifies engineering capacity — not as a novelty, but as a measurable lever for deployment reliability, developer productivity.

#LI-Remote

Avalara is an AI-first Company

• 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.