Role Description
Join Avalara's AI and Machine Learning team and help build intelligent systems that improve how businesses manage tax compliance and automation. You will design and deliver production-grade AI and ML solutions that power document intelligence, classification, retrieval, and GenAI-driven workflows across Avalara's products and platforms. You will work with engineers, product managers, infrastructure teams, and domain experts to turn complex challenges into scalable, reliable solutions that create measurable customer and growth. As a senior individual contributor, you will help raise the engineering bar through technical leadership, operational excellence, and mentorship.
You will report to Sr Manager, ML Engineering with a #LI-Remote work arrangement.
Responsibilities
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Design, build, and improve production-grade machine learning systems for classification, document understanding, retrieval, and AI-powered automation.
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Fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy transformer-based models, small language models, and other machine learning approaches to solve business problems.
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Build and optimise real-time inference services, batch processing pipelines, APIs, and model-serving workflows.
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Develop evaluation frameworks that measure model quality, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and operational performance.
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Contribute to GenAI platform capabilities including retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, prompt orchestration, document ingestion, and agent-based workflows.
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Deliver secure, scalable, and observable ML and AI services with operational ownership.
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Partner with product, engineering, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to define and implement practical AI solutions.
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Improve engineering quality through testing, monitoring, documentation, and continuous improvement practices.
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Mentor engineers and share knowledge, frameworks, and reusable patterns that strengthen AI capabilities across the organisation.
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Drive technical decisions by balancing accuracy, latency, scalability, maintainability, security, and cost.
Qualifications
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Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, with 5+ years of experience building and operating production machine learning or AI systems.
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Strong software engineering experience in Python, including building backend services, APIs, or distributed systems.
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Hands-on experience developing, evaluating, deploying, and maintaining machine learning models in production environments.
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Experience with modern AI techniques such as transformers, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation, large language models, small language models, classification systems, and document intelligence solutions.
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Use data, experimentation, and production insights to improve measurable outcomes such as automation quality, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, and developer productivity.
Benefits
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Total Rewards: In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.
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Health & Wellness: Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.
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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.
