Data Engineer

Job Description

ORL Lead Software Engineer

Avalara is the worldwide leader in sales and use tax calculation. We're the first to admit it - sales tax isn't sexy. But revolutionizing fundamental business processes -- that's big time. And that's what we're doing every day, bringing technology to bear on arcane, tedious tasks that every business in the world must deal with.
We are investing heavily into business registrations and license management to expand our product portfolio and strengthen our market leadership. And that's where you come in, to develop and expand the core layers that define Avalara's One Registration and Licensing (ORL) product line. As a Lead/Principal Software Engineer, you will apply your vision and drive to create some patentable and market leading technology. We have a phenomenal team working in an open, collaborative environment that makes taxes and compliance less taxing to deal with. It will be up to you to convert product vision and requirements into finished product. The position reports directly to the Director of Engineering.
Avalara is a global, publicly traded company. Despite our size, we maintain a startup culture focused on building great software and having the maximum impact on the world that we can and having fun while doing it. Check us out. We'd love to talk to you about what we are up to.

Performance Objectives

Here are some of the things we expect you to do when you join us:
Avalara One Registration and Licensing: Dig into our multi-patented, cloud native Avalara product suite. We are looking to build a totally flexible, extensible platform capable of handling any registration and licensing process for any industry in any geography. Show us how to create that while maximizing performance, scalability and reliability while making it ‘oh-so-simple' to operate.
Automation vs People Power. Computers are great for process automation but there's a limit to what it can do and you know where that limit is. You will tackle the unique challenges that occur at the intersection of software and people driven tasks and applying these solutions to the novel business automation that Avalara aims to create.
Industry Leadership: Avalara is the market leader and we intend on staying that way. That means we can't be complacent. We actively encourage everyone to make bold moves and keep testing the limits. We expect you to integrate best practices and clever solutions to handle the intricacies of dealing with different governments and jurisdictions for business registrations and licensing. Better yet, let's make the government change how they should process registrations and licensing by showing them a much better way! Innovation is what drives our success - help us keep pushing that needle further.
Team Leader: Drive the team to deliver more than they ever thought they could by providing expert knowledge, mentoring, and leadership. We want someone who not only understands how the system currently works, but also envisions how it should work. Share that vision with the team and empower them to make it a reality.
You + Avalara = Infinity: Avalara's vision is to be part of every transaction of every business around the world. That means making Avalara ORL a platform that can handle not just registrations and licensing but process any interaction with any government in any geography. In fact, we want every governments to use Avalara to on their end as well! The possibilities of what Avalara can do and what you can do for it is open ended! You are not just another engineer when you join Avalara. You + Avalara equal endless possibilities!
Wildcard: Anything else that is needed to make Avalara into a wildly successful company.

Qualifications

For us, qualifications are whatever enables you to meet and exceed your performance objectives. We will not specify a number of years of experience, nor tell you what degrees you must have, nor require that you be proficient with a certain set of algorithms. But, we will provide you with some thoughts on what you, the perfect candidate might have to knock this opportunity out of the park, may have probably worked on, played around with, or even just contemplated in your spare time (and to be honest, this section also helps us with SEO):
You have a track record of leading a group of engineers to delivering valuable, high quality features into production. You get excited thinking/talking about designing, building and owning large scale distributed systems that are reliable, self-healing with robust error handling.
You can talk cloud solutions in your sleep. You know what's fundamentally different about software designed for cloud from on-premise, not because you read about it but because you've been knee deep in SaaS architecture. That probably means you have extensive experience with things like service-oriented architectures, design patterns, web services, and web applications development. You have a deep understanding of system performance trade-offs, load balancing, and engineering for high availability.
You solved all sorts of tough “ility” problems – extensibility, flexibility, observability, scalability and reliability, just to name a few. This could be at the system level (dealing with resource constraints), in the database (reducing complex queries to save time), dealing with elasticity & clustering (while avoiding startup/latency issues), network and security issues, or any other part of the architecture that presents a challenge.
While many parts of Avalara are implemented using C#/.Net Core, we also have parts of the product in node.js, python and other technologies. So, experience and willingness to use a wide set of technologies while being able to claim expertise in some is a real plus with us. We call that a T-shaped person.
As far as other technologies, we use PostgreSQL as our main transactional RDBMS, and we are introducing many other cloud technologies Redis, Snowflake, Prometheus. Streaming technologies like Kafka, Kinesis, and visualization tools like Grafana are regularly in the conversation. And of course, containerization using Docker and orchestration using Kubernetes. We are an AWS shop. A background in Azure or GCP is also welcomed.
Obvious but needs to be stated... this isn't your first job in software engineering. If you are fresh out of bootcamp, this particular position as a Lead/Principal Software Development Engineer isn't for you (But do look for another opening at Avalara that is a fit for your career level!)
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field is definitely desirable. But really, it's not required if you can demonstrate that you have the right stuff. A track record that proves that is more important to us.

Culture / Behavioral Characteristics We Want To See

At Avalara, we put a great deal of emphasis on collaboration and maintaining an open working environment - having great coworkers is one of the biggest determinants for enjoying your work, and we take our enjoyment of work very seriously.
You are focused on delivering your work to production. You consider anything short of that as a failure. If business needs changed and that feature is no longer important, you ask yourself “as the team lead, how come I didn't see it coming?”
You take quality seriously. You hate running the same test over and over. But even worse is you take it personal when something breaks. The answer? CICD pipeline with automated testing. Today, we use xUnit.net and Cypress.io along with Gitlab, so it'd be a plus if you know how to use them.
The other thing we want to see is you hate being woken up in middle of the night with a production issue. You used tools like OpsGenie or PagerDuty and if you ever get paged, you know how to deal with the issue right away. You know how to run a killer post mortem to make sure it, or anything like it, never happens again. But because you hate it so much, what you really do well is build a product where this never happens in the first place. At Avalara, heroism is appreciated. But the absence of situations that require anyone to be a hero is what's really valued.
Avalara is a scrum shop. You know how to run an effective daily standup, and know the difference between backlog grooming and sprint planning, how to do estimation, and how not to plan. When we ask you why retrospectives are important, you should have a great answer with specific example that show how you and the team improved through iterations.
Your opinions matter. We are driven by technology and innovation, and we look to the smartest, most passionate people on the team as the source of ideas.