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The Storyboard

Welcome to the Storyboard, a place to explore career adventures at start-ups and companies founded by Claremont alumni and the Claremont community. Choose your next adventure at a company where you’ll have an edge from day one, and leverage our Claremont network to build your career.

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Principal Engineer

Avalara

Avalara

Software Engineering
United States
Posted on Nov 15, 2025

Job Description

What You'll Do

We're hiring a Principal Engineer / Architect — and it's big. Global big.

If you're ready to build systems that power digital trade in 100+ countries, across multiple cloud providers, and support exponential growth, this is your next move.
Why this role matters We’re building a product that helps companies create deep digital relationships with their customers — automating, accelerating, and securing the flow of transactions and documents across borders and at scale. Think real-time integrations, regulatory complexity, and mission-critical reliability — all at a global level.
What’s at stake? This product is scaling fast — global adoption, massive data flow, and increasing demand. We're talking real-world impact for thousands of enterprises and millions of transactions every day.Impact: Transform how businesses around the world interact — securely, instantly, digitally.Sound like your next chapter? This isn’t just another role. It’s a chance to build something that reshapes how the world does business.


What Your Responsibilities Will Be

  • Architect and evolve a cloud-agnostic platform built for scale and resilience
  • Build out feature-rich services that make business transactions smarter and faster
  • Design for speed, compliance, observability, and operational excellence
  • Collaborate with product, design, and engineering teams to turn vision into action
  • Lead with clarity — this is a role where your architectural judgment sets the tone

What You'll Need to be Successful

You're a systems thinker. You’ve designed and scaled distributed systems in multi-cloud environments. You don’t chase shiny objects — you build for robustness, simplicity, and change. You see complexity and architect clarity.


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.