Manager, Indirect Tax

Avalara • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

2d • Remote

About The Position

This role leads the Tax Research and Technology team responsible for maintaining and building the tax compliance content that powers AvaTax, Avalara Tax Research, and Avalara Exemption Certificate Management. Reporting to the Director, Indirect Tax, you will lead a team of 15 tax researchers spanning sales and use tax and other indirect taxes across the U.S. and Canada, with direct ownership of customer-facing tax compliance content escalations for these products.
As AI reshapes how tax content is researched, validated, and delivered, this role also sets the direction for how AI is adopted, governed, and scaled across the function, turning subject-matter expertise into AI-ready content and repeatable, defensible workflows that keep pace with a rapidly changing indirect tax landscape.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Tax, Law, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in U.S. and Canadian sales and use tax or broader indirect tax research, advisory, or compliance, including experience with multi-jurisdictional legislative change.
• 2+ years of leadership experience with a track record of managing tax teams and driving measurable results.
• Hands-on experience applying AI tools to research or content workflows. For example, prompt design, validation frameworks, or structured AI-assisted research with measurable outcomes.
• Strong analytical and legal research skills, with the ability to turn ambiguous or evolving tax authority into clear, well-organized, and defensible content.
• Effective verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex tax and AI-governance topics clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience managing customer-facing escalations in a compliance, tax, or SaaS environment.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree or certification (J.D., LL.M. in Taxation, CPA, or M.S. in Taxation).
• Familiarity with large language model (LLM) behavior, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or AI agent architectures.
• Experience with structured data formats (e.g., JSON, XM, MD), or legal research platforms.
• Understanding of ERP systems and their database structures (SAP, Oracle, or similar).
• Experience with Agile or other project management methodologies.
• Familiarity with JIRA or similar tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead Indirect Tax Content Research: Direct the team responsible for researching, building, and maintaining sales and use tax and other indirect tax content for the U.S. and Canada across AvaTax, Tax Research, and ECM.
• Own Customer Escalations: Serve as the accountable owner for customer-facing content escalations across all three products, triaging, prioritizing, and driving issues to resolution.
• Deliver Against the AI Roadmap: Ensure the team executes on the function's AI roadmap comprehensively and on schedule, providing input and subject-matter perspective into roadmap priorities.
• Uphold Governance and Guardrails: Ensure the team consistently follows established AI governance documents, quality standards, and operating guardrails when producing and validating tax content, including controls that trace every answer back to a primary authority. Provide input on governance requirements based on hands-on team experience.
• Interpret and Communicate Legislative Change: Review and translate complex, evolving indirect tax rules and legislation into clear, actionable tax compliance content and guidance for stakeholders across the organization.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Partner with Product, Engineering, and Support to align content priorities, scale AI-enabled workflows, and ensure content changes are reflected accurately in Avalara's compliance products.
• Scale Repeatable Operating Rhythms: Build reusable frameworks, prompt libraries, and review standards that let the team respond consistently and at scale to regulatory change.
• Communicate Consistently: Maintain regular, consistent communication with the team through standing 1:1s, team meetings and timely updates to ensure alignment on priorities, roadmap changes, and governance requirements.
• Manage Team Performance: Coach, mentor, and develop team members; manage workload and resourcing; and lead year-end performance reviews. Evaluate performance objective against clear, data-driven standard, making sound, well-supported distinctions between high, core, and low performers.
• Stay Current: Track changes in U.S. and Canadian indirect tax law, regulations, and industry trends, and identify high-impact opportunities to apply AI to improve research speed, scale, and quality.

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: Manager