Sr. Product Manager - Direct Tax

What You'll Do

Avalara is seeking a Senior Product Manager to lead the expansion of Avalara Tax Research (ATR) into Income Tax Research. This is a rare opportunity to define an entirely new product surface, building AI powered capabilities that help corporate tax professionals, CPAs, and tax attorneys resolve federal, state, and local direct tax questions with speed, confidence, and citation backed accuracy.

Operating at the intersection of corporate tax expertise and AI product innovation, you will partner with practitioners, internal tax experts, and machine learning teams to develop research models, content strategies, and intuitive workflows. This is an AI first role where your hands on domain judgment will directly ensure that AI generated tax answers are accurate, nuanced, and legally defensible.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

Income Tax Research Product Strategy

• Own the product vision and roadmap for expanding Avalara Tax Research into federal, multistate, and local corporate direct tax, prioritizing key workflows such as income tax provision, tax planning, and compliance.
• Differentiate Avalara against established legacy research platforms by leveraging AI native capabilities, customer discovery, and competitive insights.

AI Powered Model Development and Evaluation

• Partners with engineering, data science, and AI and machine learning teams to build, evaluate, and iterate on research models optimized for direct tax queries.
• Serve as domain authority for model quality: establish accuracy test sets, benchmark standards, and verification criteria to ensure generated answers are citation backed and defensible.

Customer and Subject Matter Expert Engagement

• Lead discovery with corporate tax departments, Big 4 and regional CPA firms, and tax attorneys to identify research pain points and validate AI product workflows.
• Collaborate with Avalara internal tax subject matter experts and represent the product at customer advisory boards, CPA conferences, and industry events.

Cross Functional Delivery and Go to Market

• Deliver clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria to enable engineering and AI teams to ship with velocity and quality.
• Partner with content engineering and legal editorial to curate primary law coverage (Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Regulations, Revenue Rulings, case law) for high fidelity retrieval.
• Work with Design to craft intuitive research experiences with transparent citation displays and fallback handling.
• Collaborate with Product Marketing on go to market messaging and track post launch adoption, accuracy, and customer satisfaction to drive continuous iteration.

What You'll Need to be Successful

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, Computer Science, or a related field; Juris Doctor (JD), Master of Science in Taxation (MST), or CPA is a strong plus.
• Product: 5+ years of product management experience shipping enterprise software or professional research tools from concept to launch.
• Direct Tax Depth: Deep expertise in corporate direct tax (federal, multistate, provision, and compliance) with background in public accounting, corporate tax, or tax technology.
• AI and Machine Learning Literacy: Practical experience with AI and large language model technologies (prompt design, accuracy benchmarking, and evaluation) with the ability to bridge tax logic with model outputs.
• Communication: Proven ability to align cross functional delivery teams (engineering, content, design, and go to market) and engage credibly with senior tax professionals.

Preferred Qualifications

• Active CPA license or JD with a tax law focus; Big 4 public accounting background.
• Direct experience building, evaluating, or launching AI powered features in a tax, legal, or regulatory research context.

• Experience in tax technology, legal technology, or enterprise research platforms, with familiarity in products such as Bloomberg Tax, Thomson Reuters Checkpoint, or CCH AnswerConnect.

Avalara is an AI-first Company

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.

How We'll Take Care of You

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.

What You Need To Know About Avalara

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 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.