In support of the Avalara SaaS suite of services, the Director, Technical SaaS Operations is responsible for the security, reliability, and efficiency of our production systems. The team is responsible for maintaining service uptime in 24 x 7 environments, meet client expectations of accessible data services, and analyze the data in support of Tier1 client support tickets when requested. The Senior Director, Technical SaaS Operations will enhance monitors, troubleshoot Windows and Linux applications, support AWS infrastructure, execute tools & automation, and impact the design of the future platform architecture. Additionally, they will be involved in developing support plans for all applications and adheres to those plans to provide the necessary level of production SLAs.

The Avalara product suite is a mix of Windows/SQL environments with a wide variety of additional open source applications present in a Linux environment. The role supports multiple projects and requires interactions and partnerships with teams and personnel from multiple business locations, skill sets, and backgrounds. As such, the position requires strong communication skills in addition to a solid foundation of technical skills, analytical abilities, and end-to-end troubleshooting techniques.

Essential Operational Engineering Skills:

• Recommend application changes to improve application performance
• Work with Development to transition applications from one platform to another when called for by the business
• Cloud Services experience with AWS or Azure
• Experienced in troubleshooting applications running on a Windows .NET stack using IIS or experienced in the LAMP stack. You must have strong experience in one and a willingness to learn the other.

 Other Duties:

• Provide technical escalation and share in the on-call rotation
• Work independently but also a very strong team player, as required for the project at hand
• Review existing processes and recommend changes or institute new processes as necessary, including the areas of monitoring, upgrades, and tuning, etc.
• Generate high-quality project documentation, such as architecture designs, implementation plans, design documents, test plans, etc.
• Participate in on-call 24/7 rotation.

Technical Qualifications

• At least 7 years’ experience in a SAAS operating environment.
• Deep expertise in the mentality, processes, and tools needed to deliver five nines SLAs.
• CI/CD process
• Strong working knowledge of Windows or Linux and it’s underlying components, system statistics, performance tuning, file systems, and io.
• Experience with either .NET or Linux in AWS.
• Past experience with scripting skills in Powershell, Python or Perl and a history of automating workloads
• Experience with production deployment, monitoring and operational support for enterprise-class applications
• Experience in performance diagnostics, capacity planning, performance architecture design, performance tuning, performance monitoring
• Experience working with load balanced high-traffic solutions/services.
• Experience in SQL and database services
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent with 5-8 years of relevant work experience
• Good verbal and written communication skills

Technologies you are likely to be working with: AWS, Kubernetes, GitHub, Atlassian suite, Powershell, Python, Terraform & HashiCorp suite, Jenkins, C#, Cloudability, Solarwinds, RabbitMQ, SQL, Linux, Docker and containerization technologies etc.

Preferred Qualification

• Can do attitude no problem is too big or too small.
• A desire to delight customers.
• A systematic problem solver, with the ability to think outside the box.
• Good data analysis skills to pick up trends before they become major problems.
• Previous experience as an enterprise-class Site Reliability Engineer
• A strong mix of Software Engineer and Operation Support skills.
• Eager to learn new technologies and programming languages.

Avalara helps businesses of all sizes achieve compliance with transactional taxes, including VAT, sales and use, excise, communications, and other tax types. We deliver comprehensive, automated, cloud-based solutions that are fast, accurate, and easy to use.

Avalara offers hundreds of pre-built connectors into leading accounting, ERP, e-commerce and other business applications. Each year, the company processes billions of tax transactions for customers and users, files hundreds of thousands of tax compliance documents and tax returns, and manages millions of exemption certificates and other compliance related documents.

A privately held company, Avalara’ s venture capital investors include Sageview Capital, Battery Ventures, Warburg Pincus, Technology Crossover Ventures, Arthur Ventures, and other institutional and individual investors. Avalara’s headquarters are in Seattle, WA and it has offices across the U.S. and in Brighton and London, England; Brussels, Belgium; and Pune, India. More information at: www.avalara.com