Senior State and Local Income Tax Researcher

Avalara•UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

19h•Remote

About The Position

Avalara is an AI-first company operating at global scale, helping businesses of all sizes achieve compliance with transaction taxes. We process billions of tax transactions annually across 190+ countries, and we’re growing fast. As a Senior State and Local Income Tax Researcher, you will play a critical role in training and continuously improving Avalara’s AI research agents on authoritative state and local income tax materials. Your work will directly enable these agents to correctly and defensibly answer complex customer questions, from audit defense research to apportionment challenges. You will work at the intersection of law, data structures, automation, and AI-enabled systems, teaching Avalara’s AI much like you would mentor a new tax analyst—except this agent will serve thousands of customers simultaneously. By using AI to capture, organize, and apply tax knowledge, your efforts will accelerate how quickly accurate tax content reaches customers, improve quality, reduce operational risk, and strengthen Avalara’s competitive edge. This is a remote role (#LI-Remote) reporting to the Sr. Director, Tax.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Tax, Accounting, Finance, or Law.
5+ years of state and local income tax advisory, consulting, or statutory research experience (ideally including audit defense, corporate structuring, apportionment, or transfer pricing).
Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous state and local income tax authority into clear, well-organized content to train and improve AI accuracy.
Hands-on experience applying AI tools: designing effective prompts, building validation frameworks, or creating structured AI workflows with measurable results.
A genuine passion for raising the bar on how AI is used to capture and apply tax knowledge.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree (J.D., LL.M. in Taxation, or M.S. in Taxation).
Experience with knowledge management systems, structured data formats (e.g., JSON, XML), or legal research platforms.
Familiarity with large language model (LLM) behavior, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or AI agent architectures.

Responsibilities

Train and refine Avalara’s AI on authoritative state and local income tax materials (statutes, regulations, case law) to answer complex customer questions accurately.
Build and own a world-class state and local income tax research product, defining quality standards and the roadmap for AI agents like Avi.
Curate and structure authoritative source materials for AI agents to reason through scenarios like audit defense, corporate structuring, apportionment, and transfer pricing.
Develop reusable prompt libraries, validation frameworks, and rigorous quality-review standards for tax-specific AI applications.
Establish measurable quality benchmarks and controls confirming AI answers trace back to primary legal sources.
Review AI agent outputs against primary legal sources to ensure defensibility and compliance integrity.
Identify high-impact AI opportunities to improve research speed, scale, and quality.
Raise the AI fluency of peers by sharing frameworks, governance practices, and structured research methods.
Design and implement workflows combining AI, automation, and existing systems to eliminate manual research effort and reduce variation in outputs.