Enterprise Systems Engineer V

Avalara

12h

About The Position

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. 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. 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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): Be 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: 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: 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: 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): 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: 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.
• 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 This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees