[Hiring] Enterprise Systems Engineer V (DevOps) @Bitovi

Role Description

Avalara is scaling an AI‑first automation ecosystem where tools like n8n and other AI workflow platforms orchestrate critical business processes across tax, finance, operations, and internal productivity. To do this safely and at scale, we need a DevOps leader who will design, set up, deploy, and run the underlying infrastructure and all components around it—including governance, security, observability, and reliability—for these AI workflow tools.

This Enterprise Systems Engineer, playing a senior DevOps Engineer role, exists to build a secure, enterprise‑grade AI workflow platform that teams can trust for high‑impact automations, reducing manual work, shortening cycle times, and improving uptime for AI‑powered workflows across Avalara.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Platform Ownership – AI Workflow Infra (incl. n8n): You are the technical owner for the infrastructure and core components that run n8n and related AI workflow tools—environments, CI/CD, containers, runtime clusters, storage, secrets, networking, and integrations—ensuring they are resilient, scalable, and cost‑effective.
• Secure‑by‑Design Governance: You embed security, privacy, and compliance into how AI workflows are built and run: hardened baselines, secret management, network and IAM boundaries, and CI/CD guards that prevent unsafe changes from reaching production.
• Operational Reliability & Observability: You define and drive SLOs, metrics, logging, and alerting for the AI workflow platform, turning incidents into systematic improvements that reduce MTTR and change failure rates over time.
• Standardization & Reuse for AI Workflows: You create and enforce reusable patterns (templates, reference pipelines, IaC modules, guardrails) so teams building on n8n and other tools follow consistent, auditable practices instead of bespoke one‑offs.
• Maturity & Governance Alignment (SMM / ARB): You partner with architecture, security, and platform teams to align AI workflow infra with Avalara's Software Maturity Model and engineering governance, moving the platform and guiding teams to higher levels of maturity.
• Bar Raiser for DevOps & AI‑First Ways of Working: You elevate how teams build and operate automations by mentoring engineers, codifying best practices, and using AI tools yourself to materially improve speed, quality, and reliability of the AI workflow platform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5–8+ years in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering for SaaS or large‑scale distributed systems, with direct ownership of production environments.
• Strong experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including VPC design, security groups, load balancers, and managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) or equivalent container orchestration.
• Deep hands‑on use of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent) to manage multi‑environment infra and platform services.
• Proven ownership of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/CD or similar), including automated testing, security scanning, and artifact management for complex services or platforms.
• Solid understanding of Linux and/or Windows, networking fundamentals (DNS, TLS, routing, firewalls), and secure secret management practices.
• Hands‑on experience with logging and monitoring stacks (e.g., Sumo Logic, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalents) and defining meaningful SLOs and alerts for production systems.
• Demonstrated experience running or supporting multi‑tenant or shared platforms used by multiple teams (internal developer platforms, workflow/orchestration tools, or integration platforms).
• Evidence of using AI tools in day‑to‑day engineering or operations (not just experimentation) with clear impact on speed, reliability, or quality.

Requirements

• Track record of raising standards for reliability, security, or automation through documentation, mentoring, or governance—leaving systems and processes stronger than you found them.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineering, security, operations, and business stakeholders, explaining trade‑offs and setting realistic expectations in non‑jargon language.
• Experience with mentoring and providing support for citizen developers who are new to agentic AI and automation concepts.

Benefits

• 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.