HR & AI Transformation Architect Remote People and Culture

Avalara makes tax compliance faster, easier, more accurate, and more reliable for businesses. We're now applying that same standard to how we run our own People & Culture (P&C) function, Avalara's term for Human Resources. A new internal team, AI Transformation & Operational Excellence, has been created to redesign how P&C delivers services to employees, managers, and the business, using AI and automation as core tools rather than afterthoughts.

This team's mandate is to rebuild P&C's processes and technology from the ground up: not just make today's processes faster, but decide, process by process, what should be fully automated, what should be enhanced with AI, and what should remain human-led. This role owns that end to end: you dig into how a process actually works today, document it clearly, decide what belongs on each side of that automate / augment / human line, and then build or oversee the build of the solution, partnering closely with Avalara's People Technology (engineering) team where needed.

This role calls for someone who has genuinely done architecture work for process before: not just documented how something works today, but designed what it should become, end to end. Paired with deep, hands‑on AI fluency: the ability to dig into a messy, real‑world process, understand it fully, document it clearly, and see exactly where AI can fully automate a step, where it should augment a person doing the work, and where the work should stay human, and then design for it.

The impact of this role is to completely reimagine how People & Culture's processes work: building a genuinely strong operating model underneath P&C, and envisioning what the experience should be for each persona who touches it, including employees, people managers, candidates, the business, and P&C itself.

This role owns the process architecture, the operating model, and the vision for each solution. From there, the actual AI tool build can go either way: hand it to the People Technology (engineering) team to build, or build it yourself, including building AI agents directly, depending on the complexity of the tool and where capacity sits at the time.

You'll operate with significant autonomy on ambiguous, cross-functional problems, and be a trusted partner to P&C leadership and to Avalara's People Technology (engineering) leadership alike.

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Dig Into & Document Current State

• Get into the details of how a process actually works today, not just what's documented, through direct observation, data review, and conversations with the people doing the work.
• Build clear, step-by-step process maps and a prioritized list of pain points and gaps that others can act on.
• Gather baseline data on existing processes, such as cycle time, volume, and error rates, to ground redesign decisions in evidence, not assumptions.

Envision the Future Experience by Persona

• Reimagine what the process should look and feel like for each persona it touches (employee, people manager, candidate, business, and P&C itself), rather than incrementally improving the current experience.
• Turn that persona‑based vision into a clear target state: what changes for the person going through it, and what has to be true of the process and technology to deliver it.
• Use that target‑state vision as the basis for the automate, augment, or human‑led decisions that follow.

Decide What's Automated, Augmented, or Human

• For each step of a process, make the call: fully automate with AI, augment a person with AI, or keep it human‑led, and be able to explain why.
• Translate that judgment into concrete technical requirements and specifications an engineering team can build against.
• Assess build‑vs‑buy for each opportunity: build…