For teams: You provide a hardened, self‑service platform for AI workflows (starting with n8n) so product, operations, and IT teams can ship automations faster without reinventing infra or bypassing governance
For the business: You increase operational reliability and speed by making AI workflows easy to change, safe to deploy, observable in production, and secure by design, directly improving SMM/DevOps maturity and audit readiness
For customers: By stabilizing and scaling AI‑driven internal and product workflows, you reduce incidents, improve response times, and enable smarter, more automated experiences across Avalara's tax compliance platform
Bar Raiser Expectations
We are hiring a DevOps Bar Raiser — someone who raises the performance, standards, and platform maturity of the teams they work with. This role is expected to improve how systems are architected, automated, deployed, and operated by enhancing engineering judgment, operational excellence, and cross-functional delivery. As part of an AI-first company, this role must also demonstrate applied AI impact by embedding AI into DevOps workflows in ways that measurably improve speed, reliability, scalability, and overall engineering effectiveness
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
If you are excited about building and running secure, AI‑ready workflow infrastructure and acting as a Bar Raiser for DevOps and AI at Avalara, we'd love to meet you
What Your Responsibilities Will Be
In this role, you will own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of Avalara's AI workflow infrastructure, with clear accountability for outcomes rather than task lists
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
12‑Month Success Signals
Stood up an Enterprise‑Grade AI Workflow Platform
N8n and at least one additional AI workflow tool are running on a governed, multi‑environment platform (dev/test/prod) with standardized CI/CD, IaC, and security controls in place
Improved Reliability and Change Management for AI Workflows
Measurable reductions in incident frequency and MTTR for AI workflow infrastructure, along with reduced deployment failures or rollbacks for n8n‑backed automations
Raised Maturity and Governance Compliance
Documented uplift in SMM/DevOps maturity scores for the AI workflow platform along CI/CD, security, IaC, and observability dimensions, with evidence used in audits and ARB reviews
Accelerated AI Workflow Delivery
Multiple teams actively building on the platform using standardized patterns and templates, with data showing shorter time‑to‑production and reduced manual operations for AI workflow changes
Demonstrated Bar Raiser Impact
Peer and leadership feedback, plus concrete examples, show you have raised standards for DevOps, automation, citizen developer adoption, and AI usage (e.g., documented patterns, training sessions, or platform improvements that others now rely on)
What You’ll Need To Be Successful
AI Expectations
Avalara is an AI-first company; this role must show applied AI impact, not casual tool usage. As a Senior DevOps Engineer for AI workflows, you are expected to leverage deep DevOps and platform engineering expertise to integrate AI into the software delivery and operations lifecycle in meaningful, measurable ways. This role should elevate how teams use AI across automation, observability, reliability, and release engineering, delivering tangible improvements in speed, stability, scalability, and operational excellence
Design AI‑Enhanced Operations for the Platform
Use AI to augment incident triage, anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, and change‑risk assessment for n8n and related infra—e.g., AI‑assisted log analysis, pattern detection in pipeline failures, and recommendation of remediation steps
Accelerate Infra and Automation Delivery with AI
Embed AI into the Platform Experience Itself
Partner with integration and platform teams to enable AI‑driven orchestration patterns (for example, intelligent routing, adaptive retries, intelligent throttling) within n8n or surrounding services, where it meaningfully improves reliability or cost
Raise AI Maturity Across Teams (Bar Raiser)
Share AI practices, patterns, and guardrails with engineers and citizen developers using the platform so AI materially improves outcomes (cycle time, incident reduction, automation coverage) instead of becoming ad‑hoc experimentation
The base pay range(s) below are provided in compliance with state specific laws. Pay ranges may be different in other locations
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