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Director, Finance of Product & Engineering

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OtherDirector

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Quick Summary

Overview

What You'll Do Avalara is seeking a Director, Finance & Strategy – Product & Engineering to serve as the embedded finance leader for Product & Engineering,

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OtherDirector

Responsibilities

~4 min read

Avalara is seeking a Director, Finance & Strategy – Product & Engineering to serve as the embedded finance leader for Product & Engineering, the largest single organization within TCO. This role partners directly with senior Product and Engineering leaders to connect product strategy, roadmap decisions, headcount planning, and operating spend into a clear financial view of what it costs to build and maintain Avalara’s products and what return those investments are generating.

This is a high-visibility, high-ownership opportunity for a finance leader who wants to operate as a true business partner to technical executives, not simply as a reporting layer. The Director will help shape investment decisions, improve roadmap-to-P&L linkage, strengthen forecasting rigor, and ensure Product & Engineering’s cost structure is translated into credible, decision-ready financial narratives for Finance leadership.

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Product & Engineering Finance Partnership

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Serve as the primary finance partner to the senior leaders across Product & Engineering, owning the day-to-day finance relationship for each aligned leader across budget, forecast, roadmap, and investment decisions.

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Build trusted relationships with technical executives and translate product and engineering priorities into financial implications, tradeoffs, and recommendation paths.

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Own the financial plan, forecast, and long-range view for the covered organization, ensuring roadmap changes are reflected prospectively in headcount and cost expectations rather than identified after the fact.

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Lead roadmap-to-P&L linkage by translating product roadmap decisions into forward-looking forecasts for headcount, cost, and resource allocation.

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Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on investment prioritization, resource tradeoffs, and reallocation decisions across the portfolio.

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Develop a clear view of product-development economics, including the cost to build and maintain products and the return profile of major investment areas.

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Lead monthly and quarterly business reviews for the covered organization, delivering clear driver-based narratives on performance, risks, opportunities, and required actions.

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Build and maintain KPI and assumption frameworks that connect roadmap execution, hiring plans, productivity, and spend performance into decision-useful financial insights.

Forecasting, Modeling, and Operational Rigor

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Produce category forecasts for the organization to the team’s reporting standards and cadence, and participate fully in category-owner accountability mechanisms.

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Model and stress-test forecast inputs using a clear assumption framework such as rate, volume, timing, and mix, rather than accepting unsupported topline figures.

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Ensure variances are explained at the driver level, with timing variances tied to an expected landing period and structural changes reflected in run-rate expectations.

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Surface emerging forecast risk early and proactively, and partner with business leaders to align on implications and mitigation actions before escalation.

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Apply the same analytical scrutiny to favorable and unfavorable variances, reinforcing a culture of forecast accuracy and operational accountability.

Cross-Functional Finance Integration

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Validate Cost of Revenue-tagged cost centers within the organization’s scope and provide the validated inputs required for consolidated gross-margin and cost-to-serve views.

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Validate headcount data for shared headcount-governance and consolidation processes, ensuring consistency with Finance standards and organizational operating reality.

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Partner with adjacent Finance teams on targeted cross-functional workstreams where Product & Engineering operational context is required, while maintaining clear ownership boundaries and a streamlined support model.

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Represent Product & Engineering in Avalara’s broader FP&A, annual operating plan, and long-range planning processes, ensuring the organization’s financial story is well integrated into company-level narratives and decision-making.

What Success Looks Like

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Roadmap-to-P&L linkage is live, credible, and actively used in real investment or reallocation decisions.

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Forecasts for Product & Engineering are accurate, driver-based, and improve over time, with repeat misses on the same underlying driver eliminated.

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Product & Engineering leaders view Finance as a trusted partner in resource allocation and roadmap tradeoff decisions.

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Consolidation inputs for headcount, Cost of Revenue, and category forecasts are delivered accurately and on cadence.

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Business reviews and executive updates clearly connect strategic choices, operating performance, and financial outcomes.

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Finance leadership has a clear and decision-ready view of product-development cost structure, forecast risk, and emerging investment opportunities.

10+ years of progressive experience in FP&A, strategic finance, or business-unit finance, ideally including direct support for Product, Engineering, R&D, or other technical organizations in SaaS or enterprise technology environments.

Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related field required; MBA, CFA, or CPA preferred.

Demonstrated success serving as a direct finance partner to senior business leaders, with the executive presence and judgment to build credibility quickly with SVP-level stakeholders.

Experience building and owning driver-based forecasting models, including headcount-to-cost, roadmap-to-cost, or related resource-planning models.

Strong financial modeling and analytical skills, with the ability to move from ambiguous inputs to structured assumptions, scenarios, and recommendations.

Comfortable pushing for clarity on assumptions and decisions while partnering from curiosity, influence, and business judgment.

Experience leading planning, forecast, and business-review rhythms in complex, matrixed organizations.

Strong systems and data fluency, including comfort working from shared data models and planning tools rather than building disconnected offline reporting.

Experience with planning platforms such as Anaplan, Adaptive, or Pigment and analytics tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or similar; SQL a plus.

Demonstrated ability to use AI tools to accelerate modeling, reporting, analysis, and synthesis while maintaining strong financial judgment.

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.

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.

Requirements

~1 min read

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.

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.