Machine Learning Engineer V

Avalara • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

45d

About The Position

Avalara is accelerating an AI-first transformation in which agentic systems will change how customers, partners, and employees complete tax compliance work. This role exists now to help build and scale the Avalara Avi Agent (AAA), the agentic engineering foundation required for Aviator and future agentic capabilities across Avalara. The person in this role will turn emerging AI patterns into secure, reliable, production-grade systems that increase automation, improve customer outcomes, and enable Avalara teams to build agentic solutions faster and with higher quality.

How This Role Elevates Avalara
As an Agentic and Machine Learning Engineer V, you will raise Avalara's ability to deliver AI-powered products at enterprise scale. Your work will help establish reusable platform capabilities, implementation patterns, evaluation practices, and operational standards for agentic applications. By improving the reliability, accuracy, security, and scalability of these systems, you will enable faster delivery of Aviator and other agentic efforts while reducing duplicated engineering effort across teams. The impact of this role will be visible in stronger customer experiences, more efficient compliance workflows, and a higher bar for AI engineering across Avalara.

Requirements

• B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a closely related technical field.
• 8+ years of relevant professional experience building, deploying, and operating production software systems, with strong preference for Python experience.
• Hands-on experience building LLM applications, agentic systems, or AI-enabled workflows in production or production-like environments.
• Experience with LLMs such as GPT, Claude, Llama, or similar models, including practical understanding of prompting, orchestration, evaluation, and reliability considerations.
• Experience with enterprise-scale software design, distributed systems, data structures, design patterns, and high-availability system operations.
• Experience working in cloud computing environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Applied familiarity with modern agentic integration patterns and protocols, such as MCP, A2A, tool use, retrieval, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI to improve measurable outcomes, such as speed, quality, automation, insight, customer experience, or scale.
• Strong communication, documentation, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate foundational agentic platform capabilities that enable Aviator, AAA, and other Avalara agentic experiences to move from prototype to production.
• Develop scalable LLM application frameworks, orchestration patterns, tool integrations, and agent workflows that support enterprise-grade reliability, observability, security, and maintainability.
• Create and improve evaluation methods for agentic outcomes, including quality, accuracy, latency, cost, safety, and task-completion effectiveness.
• Translate ambiguous business and product needs into technical designs, prototypes, production features, and measurable engineering outcomes.
• Apply modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, code review, documentation, and operational readiness, to ensure high-quality delivery.
• Partner with product, engineering, security, data, and business stakeholders to ensure agentic capabilities solve meaningful customer and operational problems.
• Research, assess, and responsibly apply emerging AI technologies, including LLMs, model-context protocols, agent-to-agent patterns, retrieval, evaluation, and automation techniques.
• Document reusable patterns and implementation guidance that help Avalara engineers and software agents build consistently, safely, and efficiently.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design reviews, code reviews, coaching, and examples of high-ownership execution.
• Strengthen the operational robustness of mature high-availability systems while introducing new AI capabilities without compromising customer trust or production stability.

Benefits

• 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 This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior