Senior Software Engineering Manager

What You'll Do

The Senior Manager will lead Avalara's 911 member Compliance India team in Pune, driving delivery, technical direction, and an AI-first, high-performance culture. The role will restore delivery velocity, strengthen team performance, translate strategy into execution, raise engineering standards, and accelerate AI-driven returns automation to improve filing accuracy, reduce errors, and support customer retention. You will report to Senior Director, Software Engineering.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Lead a team of 911 software engineers and SDETs across backend, frontend, and QA disciplines based in Pune, India.
• Oversee delivery execution for the Compliance India scrum team — including sprint planning, backlog grooming, release management, and cross-team dependency coordination.
• Drive delivery of AI-enabled and automation-first engineering capabilities including notice management automation, data retention, rejected filings workflows, and agentic compliance solutions.
• Establish and maintain consistent practices for code quality, test coverage, CI/CD discipline, and system observability.
• Partner with Product Management, TPOs, and cross-functional stakeholders to align roadmap priorities and deliver.
• Apply AI tooling (Claude Code, Glean, custom GPTs) to improve team velocity, reduce manual effort, and increase engineering leverage.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and coaching conversations to grow individual contributors and retain top talent.
• Contribute to engineering strategy, headcount planning, and talent decisions within TCO Returns.
• Ensure adherence to Avalara's security, compliance, and data governance standards for a tax technology platform.

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

Required:

• B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 10+ years of software development experience in product-focused engineering organisations (SaaS, enterprise software, or technology product companies); consult firm or staff-augmentation experience alone does not meet this requirement.
• 5+ years of engineering people leadership within a product engineering organisation, with direct ownership of team performance, delivery, and career development.
• Develop distributed engineering teams in an Agile/Scrum environment.
• Technical foundation in C#/.NET and TypeScript; ability to contribute to technical design discussions, code reviews, and architectural decisions.
• Experience with scalable, multi-tenant SaaS platform development.
• SQL knowledge (Postgres, Snowflake or equivalent).
• Delivery track record: shipping enterprise-grade software on time and within scope.
• Experience in regulated industries (finance, tax, healthcare, or similar).
• Familiarity with tax compliance, returns filing systems, or compliance automation.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and CI/CD pipelines (GitLab, Terraform).
• Experience managing teams across time zones in a global engineering organisation.
• Demonstrated AI tooling adoption and measurable productivity impact.