[Hiring] Senior State and Local Income Tax Researcher @Avalara

Role Description

Avalara is an AI-first company operating at global scale, helping businesses of all sizes achieve compliance with transaction taxes. We process billions of tax transactions annually across 190+ countries, and we’re growing fast. As a Senior State and Local Income Tax Researcher, you will play a critical role in training and continuously improving Avalara’s AI research agents on authoritative state and local income tax materials. Your work will directly enable these agents to correctly and defensibly answer complex customer questions, from audit defense research to apportionment challenges.

You will work at the intersection of law, data structures, automation, and AI-enabled systems, teaching Avalara’s AI much like you would mentor a new tax analyst—except this agent will serve thousands of customers simultaneously. By using AI to capture, organize, and apply tax knowledge, your efforts will accelerate how quickly accurate tax content reaches customers, improve quality, reduce operational risk, and strengthen Avalara’s competitive edge.

This is a remote role (#LI-Remote) reporting to the Sr. Director, Tax.

Responsibilities

• Train and refine Avalara’s AI on authoritative state and local income tax materials (statutes, regulations, case law) to answer complex customer questions accurately.
• Build and own a world-class state and local income tax research product, defining quality standards and the roadmap for AI agents like Avi.
• Curate and structure authoritative source materials for AI agents to reason through scenarios like audit defense, corporate structuring, apportionment, and transfer pricing.
• Develop reusable prompt libraries, validation frameworks, and rigorous quality-review standards for tax-specific AI applications.
• Establish measurable quality benchmarks and controls confirming AI answers trace back to primary legal sources.
• Review AI agent outputs against primary legal sources to ensure defensibility and compliance integrity.
• Identify high-impact AI opportunities to improve research speed, scale, and quality.
• Raise the AI fluency of peers by sharing frameworks, governance practices, and structured research methods.
• Design and implement workflows combining AI, automation, and existing systems to eliminate manual research effort and reduce variation in outputs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Tax, Accounting, Finance, or Law.
• 5+ years of state and local income tax advisory, consulting, or statutory research experience (ideally including audit defense, corporate structuring, apportionment, or transfer pricing).
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous state and local income tax authority into clear, well-organized content to train and improve AI accuracy.
• Hands-on experience applying AI tools: designing effective prompts, building validation frameworks, or creating structured AI workflows with measurable results.
• A genuine passion for raising the bar on how AI is used to capture and apply tax knowledge.
• Preferred: Advanced degree (J.D., LL.M. in Taxation, or M.S. in Taxation).
• Preferred: Experience with knowledge management systems, structured data formats (e.g., JSON, XML), or legal research platforms.
• Preferred: Familiarity with large language model (LLM) behavior, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or AI agent architectures.

Pay Range Details

• Colorado: $126,000-$201,600 [annually]
• Washington: $126,000-$222,800 [annually]
• California: $126,000-$244,000 [annually]
• NYC: $139,200-$244,000 [annually]

The pay range above is the general base pay range for a successful candidate in the state listed. The successful candidate’s actual salary/wage may be based on various factors, such as geographic location, candidate experience and qualifications, as well as market and business considerations. This role is eligible for an annual bonus based on individual and company performance, depending on the terms of the applicable plan and the employee’s role.

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.

Company Description

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.

We’re An Equal Opportunity Employer supporting diversity and inclusion as a cornerstone of our company.