Principal Software Engineer

About the Team:

The Midgard team in Avalara applies Machine Learning techniques to solve engineering problems. The Midgard-AI/ML platform sub-team builds solutions to automatically classify and extract information from various compliance documents.

About the Role:

This is a hard problem requiring latest techniques in machine learning computer vision, and natural language processing to be applied. There is tremendous business impact that this role will bring about by improving productivity of agents who currently do this work manually. The person will get to work with a talented team of engineers who have reputation in the open source community. The tech stack is exciting and it employs modern techniques like event-driven systems, async programming, functional programming, machine learning, platform as service and natural language processing.

What You'll Do:

• Ability to lead a Scrum team, assist in the development of key and senior-level features and solutions.

• Drive and lead proof of concept projects to construct data-driven proofs that specific design concepts and strategies work as expected.

• Be a prodigious author in the documentation of architectural decisions, design recommendations, and research.

• Act as a mentor to other engineers and team members, share your skills and expertise, encourage creativity and innovation!

• Understand how software design and architecture impact the goals of the business.

• Analyze and attribute key operational requirements into cohesive design patterns.

• Help set a standard and set an example for high-quality code review and analysis.

• Develop new implementations of data-driven technology stacks.

• Implement best SaaS practices across the enterprise.

• Collaborate with team members on code reviews and test plans

• Work with product management and subject matter experts to ensure that each feature is useful for and simple enough to be understood by, the target audience

• Design solid data models and make effective use of database technology

• Constantly seek out ways to do a better job and improve automation

• Should be available to work a few hours in line with U.S/U.K. time zones as required.

Who you are:

• 4 years degree or higher in computer science or engineering is required

• Overall 18+ years of development experience and 5+ years of experience in building highly scalable solutions

• 10+ years of experience in application development with open source technologies

• 5+ years of experience in a software development role shipping complex applications to large scale production environments on AWS or Google Cloud (GCP)

• Excellent skills in designing and developing REST APIs and services

• Strong experience and design of native Cloud applications Cloud application design patterns and practices hosted on GCP

• Broad and extensive knowledge of the software development process and its technologies

• Knowledge of architectural styles and design patterns

• Working knowledge and experience of databases and other data persistence layers from low-level implementation details on up.

• Experience implementing large-scale & low latency caching layers.

• Understanding of various coding methods and computer languages

• Data modeling and database design experience

• Experience with software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes

• Experience implementing CI/CD

• Experience in automation scripting experience (Terraform, Packer, Jenkins)

• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS)

Who We Are:
Avalara builds cloud-based tax compliance solutions to handle every transaction in the world. Imagine every transaction you make — every tank of gas, cup of coffee, or pair of sneakers, every movie ticket, meal kit, or streamed song, every sensor-to sensor ping. Nearly every time you make a purchase, physical or digital, there's an accompanying unique and nuanced tax compliance calculation. The logic behind calculating taxes — the rules, rates, and boundaries is
a global, layered, three dimensional mess of complexity, with compliance dictated by governments and applied by every business, every day. Avalara works with businesses of all sizes, all over the world — from corner stores to gigantic global retailers — to calculate tax accurately and automatically, at speeds measured in milliseconds. That's a massive technical challenge, in terms of scale, reliability, and complexity, and we do it better than anyone. That's why we're growing fast. Headquartered in Seattle, Avalara has offices across the U.S. and around the world, in Brazil, Canada, India, U.K., Belgium and across Europe.

Avalara is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender, national orientation, disability, sexual orientation, US Veteran status, or any other factor protected by law.