Senior Data Science

Avalara

1d • Remote

About The Position

As a Senior Data Scientist (AI Enablement & Solutions), you'll help accelerate our internal data organization by identifying high-value problems, evaluating rapidly evolving AI/ML tools, and delivering scalable solutions that improve the efficiency and quality of our analytics output. This role is intentionally problem-first: you'll start from the business outcome, define what "good" looks like, and then determine the most pragmatic technical path—often learning and adapting new data/AI capabilities along the way as tools evolve.
You'll be expected to make strong judgment calls in ambiguous situations, run lightweight but rigorous evaluations, and ship maintainable internal data products and workflows that are trusted by stakeholders and sustainable for the team to operate long-term.
#LI-Remote This role is not eligible for sponsorship

Requirements

• 3+ years experience in data science, analytics engineering, data engineering, or applied ML roles with a track record of delivering productionized solutions.
• "problem-first" mindset: demonstrated ability to start from an ambiguous business need, define success criteria, and deliver an end-to-end solution that partners adopt.
• Experience learning new tools/frameworks/platforms to unlock the best path forward (rather than defaulting to familiar methods).
• Hands-on ability to build and ship: SQL and Python; experience developing production workflows/services (APIs a strong plus).
• Experience working with modern data warehouses and analytics stacks (Snowflake experience a plus).
• Excellent communication and influence skills; comfortable driving alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

• Experience evaluating and implementing AI/LLM-enabled solutions (e.g., tool/platform selection, POCs, rollout, monitoring).
• Familiarity with production best practices (testing, CI/CD, observability), and building maintainable systems.
• Experience with semantic modeling / metric layers and analytics governance.

Responsibilities

• Partner with stakeholders to translate our needs into clear problem statements, success metrics, and constraints (accuracy, latency, governance, cost, and usability).
• Assess solution paths (build vs. buy vs. hybrid), and recommend an approach that maximizes value while remaining scalable and maintainable.
• Stay current on emerging AI/LLM capabilities and identify where they can materially improve analyst productivity, data product usability, or decision-making quality.
• Define reference patterns for safe and reliable AI-enabled analytics (prompting patterns, retrieval strategies, evaluation approaches, monitoring/observability).
• Create lightweight enablement assets (playbooks, templates, example implementations) that help the broader data team adopt new tools.
• Design and implement internal data capabilities such as self-serve analytics experiences, semantic/metric layers, AI-assisted workflows, or decision-support tooling.
• Partner with data engineering to productionize solutions: APIs, pipelines, access controls, logging/telemetry, and CI/CD practices.
• Ensure solutions are operable and maintainable: documentation, runbooks, ownership clarity, and measurable service expectations.
• Build guardrails that increase trust: correctness checks, permission-aware outputs, auditability, regression testing, and monitoring.
• Establish evaluation frameworks appropriate for AI-enabled systems (golden datasets, offline metrics, human review loops, ongoing quality measurement).
• Apply statistical and machine learning techniques to guide insights or enhance internal products (forecasting, segmentation, anomaly detection, experimentation support).

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.
• 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: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees