Sr. Director, People & Culture Operations

Avalara built its business on making a famously painful process, tax compliance, fast, accurate, and invisible to the people who depend on it. Now we're turning that same lens on ourselves.

We've stood up a new team, AI Transformation & Operational Excellence, to rebuild how our People & Culture function shows up for employees, managers, and the business — with AI and automation designed in from the start, not bolted on after.

This role sits at the center of that rebuild. For years, Talent Acquisition operations and HR operations have run as two separate machines that happen to share a building. You'll bring them together into one — one operating model, one team, one bar for what "good" looks like — and you'll build the AI-driven capability that makes the combined function faster and smarter than either half ever was on its own.

You'll lead two teams as one function: the operators who handle day-to-day tickets and cases across both former HR and TA queues, and the program managers who run Talent Management, Compensation, Benefits, and Talent Acquisition. You own the whole thing — the operational engine and the programs running on top of it. Specifically, that means:

• Combine former HR operations and TA operations into a single operating model — shared processes, shared tooling, shared service standards wherever it makes sense to converge them.
• Find where TA and HR have been solving the same problem two different ways, and consolidate to the stronger approach instead of preserving both out of habit.
• Define what "good" looks like for the combined operation — service levels, ticket handling standards, program delivery expectations — and hold the team to it.

• Own service-level performance across the combined queues: volume, response and resolution time, escalation handling, throughput, and satisfaction.
• Bring real operational rigor — standardized processes, clear metrics and dashboards, a continuous-improvement mindset instead of ad hoc fixes.
• Use ticket and case data to consistently identify friction, work backward to root cause, and move work to self-service wherever it makes sense — treating this as an ongoing discipline, not a one-time audit.

• Build your own agentic solutions and automations inside your team's processes — not wait on someone else's roadmap.
• Continually re-examine how work gets done, looking for opportunities to remove manual, repetitive work rather than treating today's process as fixed.
• Partner closely with the rest of the AI Transformation & Operational Excellence leadership team so your operation's needs feed directly into how P&C's processes and technology get reimagined.

• Own the program managers driving Talent Management, Compensation, Benefits, and Talent Acquisition.
• Keep program work — performance management, merit and comp planning, open enrollment, recruiting programs — on predictable timelines and coordinated with the operations side of the house.
• Set one consistent bar for how programs are planned, tracked, and reported, so leadership gets a single coherent view instead of five different ones.

• Represent the operations and program perspective when new tools, automations, or workflows are being designed, so what gets built is something your team can actually run.
• Directly lead the operations team and program managers who report to you, and build a leadership bench under you as the combined function grows.
• Set clear goals, give regular feedback, and build a team culture that thinks in terms of the whole operation — not "that's a TA thing" or "that's an HR thing."

• Proven leadership of HR and/or TA operations at scale — you know exactly where those operating models genuinely differ and where they've simply never been asked to talk to each other.
• Fluency in SLAs, throughput, cycle time, and tiered service delivery, because you've owned those numbers, not just reported on them.
• A real track record of merging separate functions — combining tools, teams, or processes rather than running them in parallel.
• Hands-on experience building agentic solutions or automation inside a live operational process, with specifics you can point to.
• Experience managing managers, plus oversight of program delivery across more than one HR discipline.
• Hands-on Workday fluency, and enough comfort with ServiceNow (or a comparable platform) to know how process change ripples through the system.

If you've spent your career being evaluated on hard operational metrics and program delivery in equal measure, and you're ready to build the operating model rather than just run the one you inherited, this role was built for you.

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. 

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.