Lead, People & Culture AI & Excellence

About the Job

The Lead, P&C AI & Excellence role will be the strategic and execution engine for Avalara's AIFirst strategy within People & Culture (P&C). This senior individual contributor serves as the program owner for P&C AI and Excellence. You will translate the P&C AI and automation strategy into execution. You will provide high impact experiences including those that are manager-facing and employee-facing.

You will also deliver cross-platform workflows, such as n8n, Glean, Service Now, and Workday.

You will focus on turning P&C priorities into a disciplined AI and automation portfolio: defining problem statements, sequencing work, governing risks, and measuring outcomes across manager and employee journeys. You bring deep project/program management experience, practical HR AI application, and experience driving business results.

You will report to the Senior Director, People Operations and partner with P&C leadership, P&C functions, People Tech/Engineering, Legal, Security, and the central AI/Agentic COE. This is a remote position in the United States.

• Own the P&C AI portfolio: maintain a transparent, experience-led roadmap spanning employee journey use cases (onboarding, performance, engagement, exits, etc.) and core P&C operations.
• Identify & prioritize AI opportunities across P&C functions, turning ambiguous ideas into clear problem statements, proposals, MVPs, and phased delivery plans.
• Stand up and run lightweight governance for P&C AI (portfolio management, timeline planning, risk reviews, content governance, sunset decisions) so AI work is sequenced alongside “run the business” obligations and aligned to engineering capacity, always ensuring stakeholder visibility.
• Own end-to-end delivery for key P&C AI initiatives: proposals, project plans, prioritization, stakeholder updates, and postmortems.
• Partner with the central AI/Agentic COE on governance, risk reviews, and data handling for P&C AI solutions.
• Drive enablement and adoption ensuring the primary agent and other AI solutions realize their full potential
• Serve as a trusted thought partner to P&C teammates on AI: clarify trade‑offs, connect AI work to company objectives, and ensure our AI story matches our success metrics.

• Act as product owner for P&C AI (including primary and sub‑agents): define use cases, prompt/decision flows, and escalation logic that span the employee lifecycle from offer accept through exit.
• Own primary agent’s performance, governance, and experience metrics for P&C (e.g., ticket deflection, accuracy, CSAT, SLAs, content quality, etc.).
• Design, monitor, and iterate tests and pilots (A/B tests, controlled rollouts) to improve the primary agent’s effectiveness for employees, managers, and P&C teammates.
• Manage program analytics to quantify impact (time saved, ticket volume reduced, quality of feedback/goals, manager behavior change, org health indicators).
• Partner with Engineering, People Tech, and the AI/Agentic COE to shape the primary agent’s architecture for P&C use cases, ensuring a scalable pattern for workflows and agents across tools
• Help define requirements and patterns for read/write access, service accounts, authorization, and data minimization for P&C AI use cases.

• 6 years of experience in HR, HR technology, product management, program management, or people analytics, with direct experience applying AI/ML in HR or people‑related workflows.
• Demonstrated experience owning complex cross‑functional programs from idea through adoption, ideally in People/HR or similar domain
• Strong AI literacy: familiarity with LLMs, agents, prompt and workflow design, evaluation frameworks, and the practical limitations/risks of AI in HR
• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills; able to translate technical detail into clear decisions and compelling narratives for executives, HR leaders, and the broader employee base.
• Proven ability to define and track outcome‑based metrics and to adjust roadmaps based on measured impact.

The base pay range(s) below are…