Job Description

What You'll Do:

What is Statutory Review and Readiness?



Avalara's Statutory Readiness & Risk Management program leverages the best of our indirect tax thought leadership to anticipate and plan for jurisdictional changes. This program facilitates a consistent, trusted framework that enables Avalara to meet change deadlines necessary to maintain our customers' compliance and mitigate Avalara's risk. The program's success is met when Avalara teams and our customers are well prepared to easily meet these change requirements with little disruption to normal operation.



Position Summary



We are looking for Project Managers to join our fast paced dynamic Returns & Payment organization. The SRR Project Manager is responsible for coordinating, tracking, and dispersing critical jurisdictional changes that impact Avalara and our customers. The role requires leading and facilitating meetings across Avalara teams, where you own session agendas, meeting notes and action item tracking. Your understanding of Avalara's returns processes and systems will be essential. Jurisdictional changes and incident management can be complex and your ability to assign action items and relay information in an easily understood manner is paramount for success. This includes potential escalations where clear and timely communication is imperative. Ultimately, you assimilate the appropriate audience and lead teams through planning and action execution until you deem Avalara fully prepared to accommodate upcoming changes.


Statutory Review and Readiness (SRR) forums are facilitated, recurring forums that bring together various parts of the business to discuss, troubleshoot, and plan for upcoming jurisdictional statutory changes. While typically planned several months in advance of a change, the forum is also used in some instances for cross-functional incident management. A Cross-functional incident is defined as an issue with a significant customer impact that requires collaboration from compliance, payments, engineering and non-engineering teams to resolve successfully.


What Your Responsibilities Will Be:

Job Duties

Effectively coordinate, lead, and facilitate meetings, action items and follow-up with cross-functional teams and subject matter experts surrounding jurisdictional changes and internal managed incidents that impact the returns operations business. Strategically partner with cross-functional teams, including Global Compliance, Government Relations, Product, Engineering, Content, Finance, and Sales to drive project execution, foster understanding and collaboration. Disperse project summaries and updates to large distribution groups via email and wiki. Attend weekly legislative monitoring meetings and disseminate comprehensive notes to the full group. Work closely with Program Lead and other Project Manager to develop SOPs for multiple intake pathways; develop a jurisdictional contact repository. Lead and drive Post Mortems for completed SRRs and Managed Incidents with cross-functional teams. Work closely with Program Lead and Project Manager to publish monthly/quarterly newsletter Attend several conferences yearly to represent Avalara Compliance and GRPS interests Build metrics, report on key milestones, and help define the programs ROI
What You'll Need to be Successful:

Key Competencies

Communication and Documentation:

Communicate regularly and effectively with various internal teams as part of research and resolution. Confidently manage state partnerships and be able to lead, conduct and contribute to live meetings with jurisdictions as a representative of Avalara. Display advanced coordination skills, effectively supporting team members across different projects. Disperse project summaries and updates via email, wiki and newsletter using proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. All communication should be clear, concise, and accurate. Communication should be adapted and tailored to suit various stakeholders, customers, and jurisdiction in evolving circumstances

Facilitation:

Regularly interact with senior management and leaders across the organization to facilitate discussions and decision making surrounding laws and regulations that impact the organization. As a meeting facilitator, you will prepare an agenda, manage the discussion and ensure it does not deviate from its primary objective, provide real time feedback to stakeholders to clarify points. After the discussion, you will prepare detailed reports that restate the problem statement, the outcome of the discussion, proposed solutions, participant feedback, potential challenges, and action items.

Relationship Building:

Cultivate a broad network of relationships with internal and external stakeholders whose support is needed to carry out initiatives Build productive working relationships with state, county, and city authorities to maximize the quality of our product

Qualifications/Skills

Strong organizational and project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple projects and priorities simultaneously Comfortable with ambiguity, adaptable to change, and thrives in a multi-tasking environment Excellent written and verbal interpersonal communication skills, with the ability to work collaboratively with stakeholders across the organization Able to quickly establish rapport and credibility with customers and cross-functional teams Excellent research and analytical skills Strong technical and problem-solving skills coupled with the ability to identify resolution to problems. Attention to detail and excellent editing and proofreading skills Highly organized time-management skills Demonstrated facilitator experience Confident in public speaking scenarios Experience working in or with state or private tax departments Knowledge of Compliance, Sales Tax, and VAT. Previous experience working across teams in a product and/or engineering organization Proficiency with internal tools such as Confluence, JIRA, Microsoft Suite AI Experience is a plus (I3) Project Manager: Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 3 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD without experience; or equivalent work experience. (I4) Sr. Project Manager: Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or minimum 6 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with minimum 3 years experience; or equivalent experience.

Preferred Skills

Either one or both of the following:

Technical Expertise Basic overall knowledge and understanding of transaction flow across the business and subsequent impacts to returns preparation and filing (advanced knowledge is a plus) Content Transaction Tax Calculation Transaction Data Flow Returns Mapping Returns Filing Automation Transactional Tax Knowledge Solid understanding of transactional tax complexities from a jurisdiction administration standpoint Standard reporting requirements across states Notice generating activities Red Flags for Audits Communication strategies


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 Avalara. We're defining the relationship between tax and tech.

We've already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing nearly 40 billion customer API calls and over 5 million tax returns a year, and this year we became a billion-dollar business. Our growth is real, 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. Ownership and achievement go hand in hand here. We instill passion in our people through the trust we place in them.

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.