Senior Director, Analytics Remote People and Culture

What You'll Do

The Senior Director, People Analytics leads the team responsible for delivering data, insights, and predictive analytics across Avalara’s People & Culture organization. This role owns the enterprise strategy and execution for our People Analytics roadmap, positioning the function as a proactive, high-impact strategic partner to the CPO and senior leadership. The Senior Director cultivates trusted advisory relationships with executives, People & Culture leaders, and FP&A to drive workforce decisions, surface trends before they become challenges, and connect talent strategy directly to business outcomes.

At this stage, the Senior Director leads the function with an enterprise lens—setting direction, building organizational capability, and driving influence at the C‑suite level—while remaining willing to roll up their sleeves on the highest‑stakes work. They raise the bar for what “good” looks like, build a team that owns the majority of analytical execution, and establish People Analytics as a function the business seeks out rather than simply responds to.

• Define and own Avalara’s People Analytics enterprise strategy, setting a multi‑year vision, roadmap priorities, and measurable outcomes that directly align with talent strategy and business goals.

• Operate at multiple levels—guiding and reviewing the team’s work, establishing clear quality standards, and when stakes or timelines demand it, diving into the data (writing SQL, shaping datasets, refining dashboards) to unblock work or model what “good” looks like.

• Build, manage, and develop a high‑performing team, cultivating both deep technical capability and strong consultative and communication skills; create a talent pipeline that scales with organizational complexity.

• Act as a hands‑on analytics leader when needed, personally driving key analyses, SQL work, and model development to maintain quality and unblock critical deliverables in a lean team environment.

• Build trusted, advisory‑level partnerships with the CPO, senior P&C leaders, FP&A, and business executives—bringing a clear, evidence‑based point of view, proactively surfacing insights, and pushing back to reset expectations when needed, including protecting capacity for foundational analytics work.

• Deliver high‑quality analytical work on tight timelines in complex, ambiguous environments; set clear expectations, make firm prioritization calls, and communicate tradeoffs transparently even when some stakeholders are unhappy.

• Own the design, evolution, and continuous improvement of dashboards, scorecards, and self‑service reporting tools that give leaders real‑time visibility into workforce trends.

• Drive advanced analytics initiatives—including attrition modeling, workforce planning, and organizational health diagnostics—and translate outputs into strategic recommendations that influence executive decisions.

• Ensure the integrity, privacy, and governance of people data in close partnership with People Tech, Legal, and P&C, establishing standards that scale across the function.

• Translate complex data into clear, compelling narratives that drive strategic action; communicate with precision and confidence to executive audiences.

• Balance methodological rigor with pragmatism; prioritize actionable, business‑relevant insights and resist over‑engineering solutions when speed and clarity are what the business needs.

• Consistently deliver high‑quality work products—both personally and through the team—on aggressive timelines; define and hold the team to clear SLAs for executives and P&C leaders.

• Translate ambiguous, high‑priority tasks into concrete analytical plans with defined scope, owners, milestones, and timelines; maintain rigorous program management across the team’s full portfolio.

• Demonstrate resilience and grit in high‑change, high‑ambiguity environments; anchor the team to priorities, model a solutions‑oriented mindset, and sustain forward momentum despite setbacks.

• 8+ years of experience in People Analytics or a closely related field

• 3+ years of experience managing and developing high‑performing teams

• Proven ability to…