Sr Analyst - Tax & Compliance - Back filing

What You'll Do

At Avalara, we're building the future of global compliance. As a Senior Analyst for Tax & Compliance, you will play a critical role in strengthening the accuracy, scalability, and AI-enabled execution of our U.S. Backfiling operations across multiple jurisdictions. Reporting to the Sr. Manager of Professional Services, you will deliver high-accuracy historical return filings that mitigate exposure to penalties, interest, and audit risk.

This role is key to standardizing our backfiling status reporting, reducing manual effort in data preparation, and accelerating turnaround times for complex corrections. You will embed AI-driven workflow improvements that enhance productivity and quality for the team while mentoring junior analysts and sharing best practices that uplift the entire group.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

• Own the end-to-end preparation, filing, and quality assurance of multi-period, multi-jurisdiction backfiling engagements to ensure high accuracy and on-time delivery.
• Independently manage complex reconciliations and variance analysis between client data, prior filings, and proposed backfiled returns.
• Handle critical client escalations and compliance inquiries related to historical filings, notices, or exposure questions with a 24-hour turnaround target.
• Prepare, validate, and transform complex historical transaction-level data before returns are prepared and filed, maintaining clear audit trails.
• Standardize weekly backfiling status, risk, and exposure reporting using AI-enabled formatting and summarization tools for customers and internal teams.
• Maintain and improve standard operating procedure (SOP) documentation for the backfiling lifecycle, ensuring alignment with client contracts, jurisdictional rules, and Avalara standards.
• Provide proactive support to Account Management and Sales teams during backfiling sales cycles, answering scoping questions and joining key client calls to build customer confidence.
• Embed AI tools into core backfiling workflowssuch as data cleansing, enrichment, variance explanation, and historical exposure summaries.

What You'll Need To Be Successful

• Bachelor's degree in Commerce, Accounting, Taxation, Finance, or a related field; or an MBA in Finance.
• 34+ years of experience, including demonstrated experience managing multi-jurisdiction return portfolios and handling compliance escalations (e.g., notices, penalty issues).
• Advanced MS Excel proficiency (complex formulas, pivots, large data-set handling) and the ability to work with complex historical transaction data to support accurate backfiling.
• Experience using AI tools to improve operational speed, quality, or scale (for example, in data analysis, documentation, or reporting workflows).
• The ability to apply AI responsibly, exercising strong judgment when dealing with compliance-sensitive topics like taxability, exposure estimates, and final return values.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to provide clear status updates, explain variance narratives, and confidently interact with clients and cross-functional teams.
• A continuous improvement mindset, ready to quantify the impact of AI-driven changes and share best practices to elevate the entire teams capabilities.