Software Development Engineer

Avalara is an AI-first company focused on enhancing productivity and customer value through the use of AI. As a Software Development Engineer on the Returns team, you will design and deploy microservices to power next-generation tax compliance products while collaborating with various teams to ensure best engineering practices are followed.

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