Enterprise Systems Engineer V (DevOps)

What Youll Do

Avalara is scaling an AIfirst automation ecosystem where tools like n8n and other AI workflow platforms orchestrate critical business processes across tax finance operations and internal productivity. To do this safely and at scale we need a DevOps leader who will design set up deploy and run the underlying infrastructure and all components around itincluding governance security observability and reliabilityfor these AI workflow tools.

This Enterprise Systems Engineer playing a senior DevOps Engineer role exists to build a secure enterprisegrade AI workflow platform that teams can trust for highimpact automations reducing manual work shortening cycle times and improving uptime for AIpowered workflows across Avalara.

How This Role Elevates Avalara

• For teams: You provide a hardened selfservice platform for AI workflows (starting with n8n) so product operations and IT teams can ship automations faster without reinventing infra or bypassing governance.
• For the business: You increase operational reliability and speed by making AI workflows easy to change safe to deploy observable in production and secure by design directly improving SMM/DevOps maturity and audit readiness.
• For customers: By stabilizing and scaling AIdriven internal and product workflows you reduce incidents improve response times and enable smarter more automated experiences across Avalaras tax compliance platform.

Bar Raiser Expectations

We are hiring a DevOps Bar Raiser someone who raises the performance standards and platform maturity of the teams they work with. This role is expected to improve how systems are architected automated deployed and operated by enhancing engineering judgment operational excellence and cross-functional delivery. As part of an AI-first company this role must also demonstrate applied AI impact by embedding AI into DevOps workflows in ways that measurably improve speed reliability scalability and overall engineering effectiveness.

• Track record of raising standards for reliability security or automation through documentation mentoring or governanceleaving systems and processes stronger than you found them.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineering security operations and business stakeholders explaining tradeoffs and setting realistic expectations in nonjargon language.
• Experience with mentoring and providing support for citizen developers who are new to agentic AI and automation concepts.

If you are excited about building and running secure AIready workflow infrastructure and acting as a Bar Raiser for DevOps and AI at Avalara wed love to meet you.

In this role you will own the endtoend lifecycle of Avalaras AI workflow infrastructure with clear accountability for outcomes rather than task lists:

• Platform Ownership AI Workflow Infra (incl. n8n)
• You are the technical owner for the infrastructure and core components that run n8n and related AI workflow toolsenvironments CI/CD containers runtime clusters storage secrets networking and integrationsensuring they are resilient scalable and costeffective.
• SecurebyDesign Governance
• You embed security privacy and compliance into how AI workflows are built and run: hardened baselines secret management network and IAM boundaries and CI/CD guards that prevent unsafe changes from reaching production.
• Operational Reliability & Observability
• You define and drive SLOs metrics logging and alerting for the AI workflow platform turning incidents into systematic improvements that reduce MTTR and change failure rates over time.
• Standardization & Reuse for AI Workflows
• You create and enforce reusable patterns (templates reference pipelines IaC modules guardrails) so teams building on n8n and other tools follow consistent auditable practices instead of bespoke oneoffs.
• Maturity & Governance Alignment (SMM / ARB)
• You partner with architecture security and platform teams to align AI workflow infra with Avalaras Software Maturity Model and engineering governance moving the platform and guiding teams to higher levels of maturity.
• Bar Raiser for DevOps & AIFirst Ways of Working
• You elevate how teams build and operate automations by mentoring engineers codifying best practices and using AI tools yourself to materially improve speed quality and reliability of the AI workflow platform.

12Month Success Signals

Within 12 months you will have demonstrably:

1. Stood up an EnterpriseGrade AI Workflow Platform

• n8n and at least one additional AI workflow tool are running on a governed multienvironment platform (dev/test/prod) with standardized CI/CD IaC and security controls in place.

1. Improved Reliability and Change Management for AI Workflows

• Measurable reductions in incident frequency and MTTR for AI workflow infrastructure along with reduced deployment failures or rollbacks for n8nbacked automations.

1. Raised Maturity and Governance Compliance

• Documented uplift in SMM/DevOps maturity scores for the AI workflow platform along CI/CD security IaC and observability dimensions with evidence used in audits and ARB reviews.

1. Accelerated AI Workflow Delivery

• Multiple teams actively building on the platform using standardized patterns and templates with data showing shorter timetoproduction and reduced manual operations for AI workflow changes.

1. Demonstrated Bar Raiser Impact

• Peer and leadership feedback plus concrete examples show you have raised standards for DevOps automation citizen developer adoption and AI usage (e.g. documented patterns training sessions or platform improvements that others now rely on).

AI Expectations

Avalara is an AI-first company; this role must show applied AI impact not casual tool usage. As a Senior DevOps Engineer for AI workflows you are expected to leverage deep DevOps and platform engineering expertise to integrate AI into the software delivery and operations lifecycle in meaningful measurable ways. This role should elevate how teams use AI across automation observability reliability and release engineering delivering tangible improvements in speed stability scalability and operational excellence.

A successful candidate will

• Design AIEnhanced Operations for the Platform
• Use AI to augment incident triage anomaly detection capacity forecasting and changerisk assessment for n8n and related infrae.g. AIassisted log analysis pattern detection in pipeline failures and recommendation of remediation steps.
• Accelerate Infra and Automation Delivery with AI
• Apply AI tools to speed up design and implementation of IaC automated CI/CD pipelines security policies and runbooks while still exercising strong judgment and governance over generated artifacts.
• Embed AI into the Platform Experience Itself
• Partner with integration and platform teams to enable AIdriven orchestration patterns (for example intelligent routing adaptive retries intelligent throttling) within n8n or surrounding services where it meaningfully improves reliability or cost.
• Raise AI Maturity Across Teams (Bar Raiser)
• Share AI practices patterns and guardrails with engineers and citizen developers using the platform so AI materially improves outcomes (cycle time incident reduction automation coverage) instead of becoming adhoc experimentation.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role you must have:

• Education & Experience
  • Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field.
  • 58 years in DevOps SRE or platform engineering for SaaS or largescale distributed systems with direct ownership of production environments.
• Core Technical Expertise
  • Strong experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS Azure or GCP) including VPC design security groups load balancers and managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) or equivalent container orchestration.
  • Deep handson use of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent) to manage multienvironment infra and platform services.
  • Proven ownership of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/CD or similar) including automated testing security scanning and artifact management for complex services or platforms.
  • Solid understanding of Linux and/or Windows networking fundamentals (DNS TLS routing firewalls) and secure secret management practices.
  • Handson experience with logging and monitoring stacks (e.g. Sumo Logic Splunk Prometheus Grafana or equivalents) and defining meaningful SLOs and alerts for production systems.
• Platform & AI Workflow Mindset
  • Demonstrated experience running or supporting multitenant or shared platforms used by multiple teams (internal developer platforms workflow/orchestration tools or integration platforms).
  • Evidence of using AI tools in daytoday engineering or operations (not just experimentation) with clear impact on speed reliability or quality.

Pay Range Details

The base pay range(s) below are provided in compliance with state specific laws. Pay ranges may bedifferent in other locations.

Colorado $126000-$201600 (annually)

Washington $126000-$222800 (annually)

California $126000-$244000 (annually)

NYC $139200-$244000(annually)

The pay range above is the general base pay range for a successful candidate in the state listed. Thesuccessful candidates actual salary/wage may be based on various factors such as geographiclocation candidate experience and qualifications as well as market and business considerations. This role is eligible for an annual bonus based on individual and company performance depending on the terms of the applicable plan and the employees role.

AI is embedded in our workflows decision-making and products. Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability.

• Youll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies ready to thrive here.

• Youll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency contributing solutions and driving results for your team our company and our customers.

• Youll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.

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.

Were defining the relationship between tax and tech.

Weve 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 - were a billion dollar business - and were not slowing down until weve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world.

Were bright innovative and disruptive like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture weve designed that empowers our people to win. Weve been different from day one. Join us and your career will be too.

Were An Equal Opportunity Employer

Supporting diversity and inclusion is a cornerstone of our company we dont 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.