Vice President, Engineering, Global Registration & Licenses

Avalara

77d

About The Position

At Avalara, we’re transforming how businesses manage compliance—not just tax calculation, but every government requirement they must meet to operate, expand, and grow. The next frontier? Global Registration and Licenses (GRL). Global Registration and Licenses, or GRL for short, is our vision for a unified, boundaryless platform that enables any company, in any industry, to obtain any kind of registration or license—anywhere in the world. Examples include: VAT registration in 100+ countries, Sales tax licenses across the U.S., Payroll tax accounts in every state and province, Local business licenses and professional permits, Lodging and short-term rental compliance, and countless more agency interactions, approvals, and renewals. You’ll be leading the engineering force building this platform and all the solutions — transforming regulatory chaos into structured, scalable, and even elegant technology.

Requirements

• 15+ years of engineering leadership experience, with at least 5 years at the VP level or equivalent
• Proven ability to design and deliver cloud-native, multi-tenant platforms at scale
• Hands-on experience building products that interface with internal foundational shared services and external high-complexity third-party APIs
• Deep technical foundation in micro-service architecture, scalable databases, distributed systems, and resilient infrastructure
• Comfort balancing product-led development with deep technical investment and architectural clarity
• Successful leadership of distributed teams in global, multi-time-zone environments
• Experience leading engineering orgs through rapid growth, platform evolution, and organizational transformation
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science

Nice To Haves

• Experience using AI and AI-related technologies
• Curiosity about new trends and best practices in AI

Responsibilities

• Architect the Future of Compliance
• Design and own a highly extensible, cloud-native platform capable of supporting thousands of regulatory workflows across geographies and industries
• Combine intelligent automation with seamless human-in-the-loop task management
• Build a flexible engine that adapts to every agency’s idiosyncrasies—without compromising scalability
• Lead a World-Class Global Team
• Inspire and manage a 150+ person distributed team across the U.S., Brazil, and India
• Build an engineering leadership culture of creativity, execution, and continuous improvement
• Set the tone for autonomy, accountability, and high-velocity delivery
• Partner for Platform and Product Success
• Collaborate deeply with Product, Design, Ops, and Customer Experience to shape and evolve a unified product vision
• Operate at the intersection of internal systems and external APIs, managing complex integrations with legacy government systems
• Define and drive a strategy that ensures Avalara can support any business compliance need—today and into the future
• Drive Operational Excellence and Innovation
• Champion engineering best practices for performance, observability, security, and CI/CD automation
• Use metrics to drive everything: quality, throughput, service levels, customer experience
• Respond to high-profile escalations with urgency and precision—and make sure the same issue never happens twice

Benefits

• Great compensation package
• Paid time off
• Paid parental leave
• Bonuses for eligible employees
• Private medical, life, and disability insurance
• Support for diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Employee-run resource groups with senior leadership and exec sponsorship

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees