Staff Enterprise Systems Engineer (DevOps)

What You'll Do

What You'll Do

Avalara is scaling an AI‑first 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 it—including governance, security, observability, and reliability—for these AI workflow tools.

This Enterprise Systems Engineer , playing a senior DevOps Engineer role ,exists to build a secure, enterprise‑grade AI workflow platform that teams can trust for high‑impact automations, reducing manual work, shortening cycle times, and improving uptime for AI‑powered workflows across Avalara.

How This Role Elevates Avalara

• For teams: You provide a hardened, self‑service 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 AI‑driven internal and product workflows, you reduce incidents, improve response times, and enable smarter, more automated experiences across Avalara's 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 governance—leaving systems and processes stronger than you found them.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineering, security, operations, and business stakeholders, explaining trade‑offs and setting realistic expectations in non‑jargon 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, AI‑ready workflow infrastructure and acting as a Bar Raiser for DevOps and AI at Avalara, we'd love to meet you.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

In this role, you will own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of Avalara's 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 tools—environments, CI/CD, containers, runtime clusters, storage, secrets, networking, and integrations—ensuring they are resilient, scalable, and cost‑effective.
• Secure‑by‑Design 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 one‑offs.
• Maturity & Governance Alignment (SMM / ARB)
• You partner with architecture, security, and platform teams to align AI workflow infra with Avalara's Software Maturity Model and engineering governance, moving the platform and guiding teams to higher levels of maturity.
• Bar Raiser for DevOps & AI‑First 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.

12‑Month Success Signals

Within 12 months, you will have demonstrably:

1. Stood up an Enterprise‑Grade AI Workflow Platform

• n8n and at least one additional AI workflow tool are running on a governed, multi‑environment 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 n8n‑backed 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 time‑to‑production 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).

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

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 AI‑Enhanced Operations for the Platform
• Use AI to augment incident triage, anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, and change‑risk assessment for n8n and related infra—e.g., AI‑assisted 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 AI‑driven 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 ad‑hoc experimentation.

Qualifications

To be successful in this role, you must have:

• Education & Experience
  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
  • 5–8+ years in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering for SaaS or large‑scale 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 hands‑on use of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent) to manage multi‑environment 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.
  • Hands‑on 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 multi‑tenant or shared platforms used by multiple teams (internal developer platforms, workflow/orchestration tools, or integration platforms).
  • Evidence of using AI tools in day‑to‑day 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 be different in other locations.

Colorado $126,000-$201,600 (annually) 

Washington $126,000-$222,800 (annually) 

California $126,000-$244,000 (annually) 

NYC $139,200-$244,000(annually) 

The pay range above is the general base pay range for a successful candidate in the state listed. The successful candidate’s actual salary/wage may be based on various factors, such as geographic location, 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 employee’s role.

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.