Principal Engineer / Architect

What You'll Do

Avalara is an AI-first company.

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

power digital trade in 100+ countries

Why you will matter

The Principal Engineer leads architecture and technical direction for scalable, secure, and high-performing software systems. This role partners with cross-functional teams to translate our goals into sound engineering decisions. The Principal Engineer brings deep technical expertise and provides mentorship across teams to ensure design practices and long-term platform success.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Architect and evolve a

  cloud-agnostic platform

  built for

  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
• Define and lead software architecture strategy to align with business and technical goals.
• Design complex, scalable, and secure systems that meet performance and reliability standards.
• Provide hands-on technical guidance and mentorship to engineering teams across projects.
• Recommend new technologies, frameworks, and tools to improve engineering outcomes.
• Conduct design and code reviews to uphold architecture standards and quality.
• Resolve system performance bottlenecks and architectural risks.
• Create technical documentation, including diagrams and specifications.
• Promote a culture of innovation, experimentation, and continuous improvement.- Lead AI solution design within product areas, including auto-remediation and predictive analytics.
• Set AI-related coding and security standards; mentor teams on AI tooling.

What You'll Need to be Successful

distributed systems

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, including full-stack development.
• Expertise in Java or C# programming
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems.
• Experience of architectural patterns and system design best practices.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, AWS cloud services, and DevOps tooling (e.g., Terraform, Docker, and ECS).
• Experience with Agile methodologies, including TDD and BDD. - Experience migrating monolithic applications to microservices or serverless architecture.
• Experience with Enterprise Integration Patterns.

AI-First Capability Requirements:

Commitment to learning and applying AI advancements relevant to your domain.

Understanding of responsible AI principles (data privacy, bias mitigation, hallucinations).

Experience applying AI at scale in architecture, product features, or operations.

You will be reporting to the Vice President.

This is a remote position.

#LI-Remote