Lead Site Reliability Engineer

What You’ll Do

You will lead how reliability is engineered across Avalara's global SaaS platform as we scale and move toward an AI-first operating model. You will focus on building a modern, automation-first reliability ecosystem that improves system stability, reduces operational risk, and enables faster, safer product delivery. You will work across multi-cloud environments to design self-healing systems, advance observability, and modernise deployment practices.

As a senior individual contributor, you will also raise the technical bar by shaping standards, mentoring engineers, and driving measurable improvements in reliability and performance.

#LI-REMOTE

• Own and evolve the reliability strategy for distributed SaaS systems across multi-cloud platforms
• Design and implement AI-driven operations, including predictive monitoring, anomaly detection, and automated root cause analysis
• Build and scale observability solutions using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Open Telemetry
• Create self-healing systems and automation frameworks that reduce manual operational work
• Improve deployment practices using feature flags, progressive delivery, and safe rollout strategies
• Ensure reliability and performance of CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code environments
• Strengthen system availability, scalability, and fault tolerance across Kubernetes-based platforms
• Lead incident response, improve recovery times, and implement lasting fixes through post-incident reviews
• Integrate AI-driven workflows into incident detection, triage, and resolution to improve operational efficiency
• Mentor engineers and drive adoption of automation-first and AI-first reliability practices

• 10+ years of experience in SaaS, distributed systems, or site reliability engineering
• Programming skills in Go, Java, or Python
• Deep experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Open Telemetry
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, containerisation, and multi-cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, or OCI)
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, networking, and cloud-native architectures
• Proven ability to design automation, improve system reliability, and apply AI or machine learning to operational workflows

AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products. Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability.

• You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here.
• You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers.
• You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.

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.

We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech.

We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. Our growth is real - we're a billion dollar business - and we’re not slowing down until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of…