Principal Engineer

What You'll Do

Avalara is an AI-first company. We expect every engineer, manager, and to use AI to enhance productivity, quality, innovation, and customer value. AI is embedded in our workflows, and products and success at Avalara requires embracing AI as an essential capability, not an optional tool.

Avalara is building the world's cloud compliance platformand our Connectors/Integration team makes it work everywhere our customers do business. We build and evolve high-quality connectors between Avalara services (e.g., AvaTax and E-Invoicing and Live Reporting/\"ELR\") and third-party ERPs, commerce platforms, and other SaaS systems. Avalara emphasizes an AI-first engineering culture and operates at true global scaletens of billions of API calls and millions of returns annuallyso your architectural decisions have outsized impact.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• You will Champion AI-accelerated engineering (code assist, test generation, runbook/diff summarization) to improve productivity, quality, and time-to-value.
• Lead the integration architecture for connectors that link Avalara services (AvaTax, ELR etc) with major ERPs (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite) and commerce platforms (e.g., Shopify, Adobe Commerce/Magento, WooCommerce), ensuring reliability, security, and great developer experience.
• Define canonical patterns (auth, retries/idempotency, versioning, webhooks/eventing, rate limiting, back-pressure) and enforce them across connector codebases.
• Lead cross-functional design with Product, Partner, Security, and SRE to translate business flows and regulatory needs into scalable integration contracts and SLAs.
• Improve on quality & operability: instrument connectors for observability (metrics, tracing, structured logs), establish golden signals, and bring incident post-mortems to closure.
• Mentor and multiply multiple teams as a hands-on technical leaderperform deep design reviews, pair on complex threads, and guide build-vs-buy choices (SDK vs. iPaaS).
• Model integration workflows, error handling, and authentication patterns in consideration of platform and regional requirements.
• Ensure seamless data flow and synchronization between systems, minimizing latency and ensuring data integrity for an ever-growing client-base and increasing data volumes.
• You will report to the Senior Director.

What You'll Need to be Successful

Bachelor/master's degree in computer science or equivalent

• 12+ years of experience building large-scale integrations/connectors between heterogeneous enterprise systems; track record shipping production-grade ERP/ecommerce connectors.
• Expert in API design (REST/gRPC), authN/Z (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT; SAML), and data interchange (JSON, XML; familiarity with EDI helpful).
• Background with event-driven and batch patterns, queues/streams (e.g., Kafka/SQS), and idempotent workflows.
• Polyglot skills in one or more of Java, C#, Go, , or Python with a deep code-review experience and an insistence on testing culture.
• Cloud-native fundamentals: containers/Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), CI/CD, secrets management, and security best practices.
• Multi-team initiatives, define north-star architectures, and coach senior engineers.
• Harness GenAI and Agentic AI both to accelerate engineering workflows (code generation, test automation, observability insights) and to create agentic partner experiences with major business platforms (Workday, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Shopify).
• Domain familiarity with AvaTax and ELR (or similar tax/e-invoicing systems) is a plus; experience with platforms like NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Shopify, Adobe Commerce/Magento is valued.