At Avalara, we’re transforming how businesses manage compliance—not just tax calculation, but every government requirement they must meet to operate, expand, and grow. The next frontier? Global Registration and Licenses (GRL).
Global Registration and Licenses, or GRL for short, is our vision for a unified, boundaryless platform that enables any company, in any industry, to obtain any kind of registration or license—anywhere in the world. Examples include:
VAT registration in 100+ countries
Sales tax licenses across the U.S.
Payroll tax accounts in every state and province
Local business licenses and professional permits
Lodging and short-term rental compliance
And countless more agency interactions, approvals, and renewals
You’ll be leading the engineering force building this platform and all the solutions — transforming regulatory chaos into structured, scalable, and even elegant technology.
What Your Responsibilities Will Be
As Vice President of Engineering for GRL, you’ll lead Avalara’s ambitious and impactful product engineering efforts. You will:
Architect the Future of Compliance
Design and own a highly extensible, cloud-native platform capable of supporting thousands of regulatory workflows across geographies and industries
Combine intelligent automation with seamless human-in-the-loop task management
Build a flexible engine that adapts to every agency’s idiosyncrasies—without compromising scalability
Lead a World-Class Global Team
Inspire and manage a 150+ person distributed team across the U.S., Brazil, and India
Build an engineering leadership culture of creativity, execution, and continuous improvement
Set the tone for autonomy, accountability, and high-velocity delivery
Partner for Platform and Product Success
Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, Ops, and Customer Experience to shape and evolve a unified product vision
Operate at the intersection of internal systems and external APIs, managing complex integrations with legacy government systems
Define and drive a strategy that ensures Avalara can support any business compliance need—today and into the future
Drive Operational Excellence and Innovation
Champion engineering best practices for performance, observability, security, and CI/CD automation
Use metrics to drive everything: quality, throughput, service levels, customer experience
Respond to high-profile escalations with urgency and precision—and make sure the same issue never happens twice
What You'll Need to be Successful
15+ years of engineering leadership experience, with at least 5 years at the VP level or equivalent
Proven ability to design and deliver cloud-native, multi-tenant platforms at scale
Hands-on experience building products that interface with internal foundational shared services and external high-complexity third-party APIs
Deep technical foundation in micro-service architecture, scalable databases, distributed systems, and resilient infrastructure
Comfort balancing product-led development with deep technical investment and architectural clarity
Successful leadership of distributed teams in global, multi-time-zone environments
Experience leading engineering orgs through rapid growth, platform evolution, and organizational transformation
- Bachelors degree in Computer Science
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.