Site Reliability Engineer

What You'll Do

As an Engineering Operations Center Site Reliability Engineer, you will join the Engineering Operations Center (EOC) team. This team provides a centralized and authoritative view of situational awareness across critical production applications. You will be instrumental in protecting the availability and performance of customer-facing systems, serving as the first response for engineering events, and helping teams improve application readiness before production release. Avalara is an AI-first company, and in this role, you will be an AI Bar Raiser—identifying meaningful opportunities to AI securely and ethically to improve speed, quality, insight, and scale.

About the Team

The Engineering Operations Team is a key contributor to Reliability Engineering and provide 24x7x365 support for our customer facing applications. We are a gate to ensure all new applications meet the minimum requirements required to achieve Avalara reliability standards. We also manage all production incidents, monitor, escalate and provide feedback to application engineering teams to achieve operational excellence. In support of compliance, we manage production deployments and are a checkpoint for release maturity.

Your Responsibilities

• Monitor customer-facing, revenue-critical applications and respond to production events with clear ownership and urgency.
• Manage incidents using standard processes that improve consistency, communication, escalation, and resolution quality.
• Maintain a clear view of operational health by using observability, data analysis, and situational awareness to identify risks before they affect customers.
• Deploy applications and review new application readiness, providing feedback to improve supportability, observability, deployment maturity, and operational excellence.
• Troubleshoot application, infrastructure, and platform issues across Linux, Windows, cloud, container, database, and networking environments (including GCP, OCI, AWS, and Azure).
• Build and improve automation, scripts, and operational tools to reduce manual effort and improve response quality.
• Recommend application and infrastructure changes that improve performance, availability, scalability, and reliability, while reviewing architecture designs and test plans to identify supportability gaps.
• Partner with engineering, support, and operations teams to improve incident outcomes and production readiness.
• Develop and champion the responsible use of artificial intelligence tools to improve troubleshooting, documentation review, pattern detection, automation design, and operational insight.

What You'll Need To Be Successful

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience supporting large-scale cloud solutions in an enterprise production environment.
• 2+ years of experience with production deployments, monitoring, incident response, and operational communications.
• Experience troubleshooting applications and cloud-based infrastructure in Linux and Windows environments, with knowledge of observability and reliability practices.
• Expertise with containerized applications or Kubernetes, and experience with Structured Query Language and database services.
• Scripting expertise with one or more languages such as PowerShell, Python, Bash, or Perl.
• Experience using automation to reduce operational toil and improve quality, consistency, or speed.
• Experience with performance diagnostics, capacity planning, performance monitoring, or tuning.
• Demonstrated applied AI capability, with experience using tools such as Glean, ChatGPT, Claude, or similar platforms to securely improve work quality, analysis, or automation.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills for incident coordination, technical feedback, and cross-team partnership.
• A "Bar Raiser" mindset: holding yourself and others to high standards of quality, demonstrating strong judgment, and leaning into action and problem-solving to leave every team, process, or system stronger than you found it.

About Avalara

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 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.

We're An 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.