Principal AI Workflow Automation Engineer

About the Role

Avalara is building an AI-first company, and this role helps turn that ambition into real operating capability. As an AI Automation Engineer, you will design and scale enterprise-grade automation that reduces manual work, improves process quality, and helps teams move faster across the business. You will use n8n as a core orchestration platform and build patterns that connect workflows, systems, data, and AI capabilities in a secure, reliable, and measurable way. This is a high-impact individual contributor role for someone who wants to raise engineering standards, shape how automation is built, and help Avalara embed AI into day-to-day execution in a practical, governed way.

What the Team Does

This team helps Avalara improve how work gets done across the company by designing automation, workflow orchestration, and transformation patterns that scale. The focus is not just on task automation, but on building reusable, resilient systems that improve speed, quality, and visibility across business processes. In line with Avalara’s AI-first direction, the team also helps embed AI into workflows where it can improve execution while keeping human judgment, governance, and accountability in place.

What the Role Does

This role owns the technical design and engineering of AI-enabled automation patterns that can be used across functions. You will help define how Avalara builds, deploys, governs, and improves workflows using n8n, integrations, APIs, event-driven systems, and AI services. You will operate as a hands-on senior engineer while also raising the bar for reliability, observability, and development standards across the automation ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build scalable automation and orchestration solutions that reduce manual effort and improve process quality across the business.
• Serve as a technical owner for n8n and help define platform standards, environment strategy, and deployment practices.
• Create reusable workflow patterns that connect n8n, integration platforms, APIs, event-driven systems, and AI services.
• Embed AI capabilities into workflows, including agent orchestration, prompt-controlled actions, model integrations, and human review steps where needed.
• Define and improve standards for logging, monitoring, alerting, exception handling, retry logic, security, and reliability.
• Build and support continuous integration and delivery practices for workflow deployment, versioning, and release quality.
• Establish reusable templates, design patterns, and governance practices that help teams build automation more consistently.
• Lead architecture reviews, workflow design sessions, and post-incident reviews to improve platform quality and execution rigor.
• Mentor engineers and implementation partners on automation design, responsible AI usage, and operational excellence.
• Use metrics such as adoption, reliability, cycle time, and operational performance to improve automation outcomes over time.

AI Expectations

As an AI-first company, Avalara expects this role to embed AI into how automation and transformation work is designed and executed. This role will:

• Design and implement AI-enabled workflows and transformation patterns that materially improve speed, automation, and scale.
• Use AI tools to optimize development productivity, workflow diagnostics, process analysis, and root-cause investigation.
• Identify high-value AI automation opportunities tied to efficiency, reliability, employee experience, or customer impact.
• Apply AI responsibly with appropriate governance, security, and risk considerations.
• Elevate AI capability across the automation team by sharing best practices and driving measurable adoption.

This role must demonstrate applied AI impact — not casual tool usage — and quantify improvements enabled by AI-driven automation and transformation.

What You Bring

• B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (required)
• 10+ years of experience in enterprise automation, workflow engineering, integration engineering, or platform architecture.
• Deep hands-on expertise in n8n or Boomi, including building and orchestrating AI-enabled workflows, agents, and cross-functional business automations.
• Experience designing API-first and event-driven architectures, including integration of AI/ML services and agent-based systems.
• Strong understanding of REST, webhooks, OAuth, JWT, and API security, along with secure integration of AI services and model endpoints.
• Experience implementing CI/CD for automation or integration platforms, including deployment and versioning strategies for AI workflows, prompts, and models.
• Cloud experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including AI/ML services (e.g., Bedrock, Azure OpenAI) and scalable model integration patterns.
• Familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, AI agents, and orchestration frameworks, and how they apply to enterprise automation.
• Experience with observability and monitoring, including AI-specific considerations (latency, cost, accuracy, drift).
• Proven ability to influence architecture and technical direction at scale, including driving adoption of AI-powered automation, process transformation, and intelligent orchestration patterns.

Avalara is an AI-first Company

AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products. Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability. You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here. You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers. You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.

How We’ll Take Care Of You

• Total Rewards: In addition to a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave, many Avalara employees are eligible for bonuses.
• Health & Wellness: Benefits vary by location but generally include private medical, life, and disability insurance.
• Inclusive culture and diversity: Avalara strongly supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is committed to integrating them into our business practices and our organizational culture. We also have a total of 8 employee-run resource groups, each with senior leadership and exec sponsorship.

What You Need To Know About Avalara

We’re defining the relationship between tax and tech. We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. Our growth is real - we're a billion dollar business - and we’re not slowing down until we’ve achieved our mission - to be part of every transaction in the world. We’re bright, innovative, and disruptive, like the orange we love to wear. It captures our quirky spirit and optimistic mindset. It shows off the culture we’ve designed, that empowers our people to win. We’ve been different from day one. Join us, and your career will be too.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Supporting diversity and inclusion is a cornerstone of our company — we don’t want people to fit into our culture, but to enrich it. 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. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.

Key skills/competency

• AI Workflow Automation
• Enterprise Automation
• Workflow Orchestration
• Integration Engineering
• API Design
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Prompt Engineering
• n8n (Platform)
• CI/CD
• Cloud Platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)