Avalara - Principal Engineer/Architect - Connectors & Integrations

Description :

Role : Principal Engineer / Architect

Exp : 12 - 18

Location : Remote

Principal Engineer, Connectors & Integrations (JD)

About the team & why this role exists :

Avalara is building the worlds 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 & 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 scale tens of billions of API calls and millions of returns annuallyso your architectural decisions have outsized impact.

What youll do :

- Champion AI-accelerated engineering (code assist, test generation, runbook/diff summarization) to improve productivity, quality, and time-to-value.

- Own 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.

- Raise the bar on quality & operability: instrument connectors for observability (metrics, tracing, structured logs), establish golden signals, and drive 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 pragmatic build-vs-buy choices (SDK vs. iPaaS).

- Model integration workflows, error handling, and authentication patterns aligned to 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.

What youll need to succeed :

- 12+ years 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 a plus), and data interchange (JSON, XML; familiarity with EDI helpful).

- Strong 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, Node.js, or Python with deep code-review chops and an insistence on testing culture.

- Cloud-native fundamentals: containers/Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform), CI/CD, secrets management, and security best practices.

- Proven ability to lead multi-team initiatives, define north-star architectures, and coach senior engineers.

- Ability to 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, etc).

- 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 highly valued.