Principal Automation Engineer

Principal Solution Architect

As Avalara continues to scale its AI-first enterprise systems, workflows, and automation footprint, we must ensure our AI automation and transformation architecture is intentional, governed, and built for long-term scale. This role exists to define and drive enterprise architecture for AI automation and business transformation, reduce fragmentation across workflow, agent, and integration solutions, and enable faster, more reliable delivery of automation initiatives that support business growth and operational excellence.

This is a senior individual contributor lead role responsible for shaping scalable AI automation architectures, improving solution resilience and governance, and ensuring platform strategy supports measurable business outcomes across the company. This role will work extensively with business stakeholders, AI Automation engineers and BSAs to turn business transformation opportunities into durable, enterprise-grade architectural patterns.

This role directly strengthens Avalara's enterprise AI automation and transformation ecosystem by increasing architectural rigor, scalability, reuse, and long-term sustainability across business workflows, platforms, and enterprise systems.

This Principal Solution Architect will:

• Improve operational efficiency, resilience, and process quality by establishing scalable AI automation architecture standards and governance guardrails
• Accelerate transformation delivery and reduce rework through clear design frameworks, decision models, and reusable automation patterns
• Enhance employee and customer experience by reducing manual work, process fragmentation, and automation risk
• Embed AI-first architectural practices that improve automation scale, decision quality, and measurable business outcomes

As a Bar Raiser, this role is expected to elevate the performance of the organization — not simply maintain it. This includes:

• Holding high standards for architectural clarity, quality, and accountability
• Using data and measurable impact to guide enterprise technical decisions
• Simplifying complex, cross-system and cross-workflow challenges into scalable and sustainable designs
• Guiding AI Automation Engineers, BSAs, and solution designers to raise automation maturity and talent density
• Challenging assumptions respectfully and improving execution rigor across teams
• Leaving every system, process, and architectural framework stronger than it was before

This role does not only design solutions — it improves how the organization thinks about, governs, and executes AI automation and transformation at scale.

Within the first 12 months, this role will have:

• Established documented architectural decision frameworks adopted across major AI automation and transformation initiatives
• Reduced automation-related rework, architectural escalations, or solution fragmentation across cross-functional programs
• Standardized AI-enabled orchestration, API-first, event-driven, and human-in-the-loop patterns across new enterprise initiatives
• Implemented measurable governance, observability, and cost-management standards for automation platforms and AI-enabled workflows
• Influenced platform and solution decisions that improve scalability, business value, and long-term cost efficiency
• Elevated architectural rigor and alignment across business, BSA, and AI Automation Engineering teams

As an AI-first company, Avalara expects this role to embed AI into architectural strategy and delivery.

This role will:

• Design and govern AI-enabled automation patterns, agentic workflows, and transformation architectures that improve speed, scale, and decision quality
• Evaluate and incorporate AI-driven orchestration, prompt and model governance, and human-in-the-loop decision frameworks into enterprise architecture
• Use AI tools to improve architectural documentation, process analysis, impact assessment, and scenario modeling
• Identify AI opportunities tied to measurable business outcomes (efficiency, cycle-time reduction, reliability, employee experience, customer impact, risk reduction)
• Apply AI responsibly, with attention to governance, security, compliance, auditability, and cost control

Demonstrating…