Software Development Engineer

Avalara is an AI-first company that integrates AI into its workflows and products. The Software Development Engineer will design and deploy microservices for tax compliance products and manage cloud infrastructure while collaborating with various teams to enhance product features.

Responsibilities:

• You will Develop microservices in a modern stack
• You will manage the cloud infrastructure: provision, secure, and tune workloads on AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, EventBridge, IAM) and evaluate or integrate other cloud vendors when needed (e.g., Azure OpenAI, GCP Vertex)
• Integrate generative-AI APIs and tooling: prototype, productionize, and monitor features using providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Bedrock; orchestrate prompts/agents by LangChain or custom frameworks; enforce data-privacy guardrails
• Champion engineering best practices: CI/CD with GitLab Actions, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CDK), automated testing, SLO/Service level agreement ownership, and cost optimization
• Mentor and collaborate: pair on tricky problems, review PRs with empathy, and partner with product, design, and ML teams to ship valuable experiences

Requirements:

• 4 years work experience building and operating production backend systems
• 4 years knowledge of AWS primitives (VPC networking, IAM, security, observability, billing) and experience migrating or operating workloads across multiple cloud providers
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Python, Java) and comfort working full-stack when needed
• Hands-on experience calling or hosting generative-AI models (OpenAI, Bedrock, Vertex, Hugging Face) with understanding of prompt design, token costs, rate limits, and basic RAG patterns
• Experience using AI and AI-related technologies
• Ability to apply AI to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results