Software Engineer

Reqs

Position originally budgeted for Germany, after replanning with the GM/VP this position was relocated for Brazil as our long term strategy is to support LATAM with this team.

Job Description

We are investing heavily in Electronic Invoicing and Live Reporting to expand our product portfolio and strengthen our market leadership.

And that's where you come in to develop and expand the core layers that define Avalara's e-Invoicing and Live reporting (ELR) product line.

As a Software Engineer, you will apply your skills to work among a team to create some patentable and market-leading technology.

We have a phenomenal team working in an open, collaborative environment that makes taxes and compliance less taxing to deal with.

It will be up to you and the team to convert the product vision and requirements into a finished product.

Avalara is a global, publicly-traded company. Despite our size, we maintain a startup culture focused on building great software and having the maximum impact on the world that we can, and having fun while doing it.

Check us out. We'd love to talk to you about what we are up to!

Here are some of the things we expect you to do when you join us:

• Avalara e-Invoicing and Live Reporting: Dig into our multi-patented, cloud-native Avalara product suite. We are looking to build a flexible, extensible platform capable of handling any opportunity to create and submit electronic invoices and live reporting processes for any industry in any geography. Work with your team to create that while maximizing performance, scalability, and reliability while making it ‘oh-so-simple' to operate.
• Design With The Vision In Mind: You know how to take requirements and create software designs and other forms of architectural documentation. In doing so, you can exert technical influence over the team, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience.
• Code, Review, Commit: Become part of the team to deliver more than you ever thought possible. Research, identify, and utilize appropriate tools, libraries, frameworks, and languages to solve problems and deliver results using the most effective methods—document software functionality, including public APIs and customer-facing UIs. Participate in project estimation and scoping exercises. Perform code reviews and have your code reviewed by peers.
• Create Industry-Leading Products: Avalara is the market leader, and we intend on staying that way. That means we can't be complacent. Own key areas within our platform. And as owners, we actively encourage everyone to make bold moves and keep testing the limits. Innovation is what drives our success - help us keep pushing that needle further.
• Automation vs. People Power. Computers are great for process automation, but there's a limit to what they can do. You and the team will tackle the unique challenges at the intersection of software
• You + Avalara = Infinity: Avalara's vision is to be part of every transaction of every business around

the world. That means making Avalara ELR a platform that can handle not just the submission of invoices but all the continuous compliance processes with any government in any geography. In fact, we want every government to use Avalara on their end as well! The possibilities of what Avalara can do and what you can do for it are open-ended! You are not just another engineer when you join Avalara. You and Avalara equal endless possibilities!

Qualifications

For us, qualifications enable you to meet and exceed your performance objectives. This position preferably requires a minimum of 8 years' related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 6 years' experience and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 3 years' experience; or equivalent experience.

Here we will provide you with some thoughts on what you, the perfect candidate, may have probably worked on, played around with, or even just contemplated in your spare time, to knock this opportunity out of the park (and to be honest, this section also helps us with SEO):

• You have a track record of delivering valuable, high-quality features into production. If we ask you to tell us about your work that went into production, you can substantiate the claim by telling us about specific examples and how you knew it was done well.
• You know what's fundamentally different about software designed for the cloud from on-premise, not because you read about it but because you've been knee-deep in SaaS. That means you have experience with things like service-oriented architectures, microservices, and web application development. You have a firm understanding of system performance trade-offs, load balancing, and engineering for high availability.
• You have experience solving specific “ility” problems – extensibility, flexibility, observability, scalability, and reliability, to name a few. Maybe it was at a system level (dealing with resource constraints), in the database (reducing complex queries to save time), dealing with elasticity & clustering (while avoiding startup/latency issues), network, and security issues.
• While many parts of our solution are implemented using the Java stack, we also have details of the product in node.js, python, and other technologies. So, experience and willingness to use a broad set of technologies while claiming expertise in some is a real plus with us. We call that a T-shaped person.
• As far as other technologies, we use MySQL as our primary transactional RDBMS, and we are introducing many other cloud technologies Redis, Snowflake, and Prometheus. Streaming technologies like Kafka, Kinesis, and visualization tools like Grafana are regularly in the conversation. And, of course, containerization using Docker and orchestration using Kubernetes. We are an AWS shop. A background in Azure or GCP is also welcomed
• It is obvious, but it needs to be stated… this isn't your first job in software engineering, but you've probably worked over 5 years in the industry. If you are fresh out of Bootcamp, this position as a Senior Software Engineer isn't for you (But do look for another opening at Avalara that fits your career level!
• A Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field is desirable. But really, it's not required if you can demonstrate that you have the right skills. A track record that proves that it is more important to us.

Culture / Behavioural Characteristics We Want To See

• At Avalara, we put a great deal of emphasis on collaboration and maintaining an open working environment - having great coworkers is one of the most significant determinants for enjoying your work, and we take our enjoyment of work very seriously.
• You take pride in delivering your work to production. If the business needs to be changed and that feature is no longer necessary, you want to be asking yourself, “how come I didn't see it coming?”
• You take quality seriously. You hate running the same test over and over. But even worse is that

you take it personally when something breaks. You've seen, or better yet implemented, a CICD

pipeline with automated testing.

• We also want to see that you hate being woken up in the middle of the night with a production issue. You are familiar with tools like OpsGenie or PagerDuty. But because you hate this so much, what you do well is build a product where this never happens in the first place and make sure to write detailed SOP (standard operating procedures) and runbooks with monitoring and alerting. At Avalara, heroism is appreciated. But the absence of situations that require anyone to be a hero is what's valued.
• Avalara is a scrum shop. You've participated in daily standup and know the difference between backlog grooming and sprint planning, how to do estimation, and how not to plan. When we ask you why retrospectives are essential, you should have a great answer with a specific example that shows how you and the team improved through iterations.
• Your opinions matter. We are driven by technology and innovation, and we look to the most intelligent, most passionate people on the team as the source of ideas.

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.