Our Winning Culture
Who We Are
Avalara is a born-in-the-cloud company with an innovative AI-powered global compliance platform that looks to be part of every transaction in the world — estimated to be 30 trillion each year. Our software solutions are so powerful and robust that they could manage this today. Our team is pursuing a massive worldwide opportunity, building the first global compliance platform in human history.
Driven to Compete and Win
Today we are focused on building a global dream team for the ages, aspiring to be great every moment and to get better every day. We are a meritocracy that rewards and advances our strongest performers, while valuing diversity in all its forms. At Avalara, diversity goes beyond gender and ethnicity — it encompasses a wide range of experiences, backgrounds, and cultures. We believe this richness of perspectives strengthens our teams and overall company.
We recruit talent from around the world and work to keep employees who are driven to win and challenge themselves and their team members. The most successful among us are those who augment their skills and intelligence with grit and perseverance.
Our top performers are self-starters that possess unrelenting stamina, pushing themselves to work hard and smart every day, get the job done well every time — and inspire their peers to do the same. While we hire strong individuals, we know that we cannot achieve our goals without being great teammates who excel at collaboration. We recognize the vastness of our mission and those who do not meet our high-performance standards must improve or leave; this is tough but fair.
What To Expect
Our culture is defined by our ambition and the high expectations we set in service of our customers, our partners, and ourselves. It calls for outstanding effort and creativity, and for seeking opportunities to disrupt the status quo. We’re comfortable in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment, where achieving more and getting the job done is expected and rewarded. The color orange is a symbol for our culture — confident, passionate, optimistic, and unique. Orange unites us and reminds us we must deliver on the high bar we set through our customer value proposition: to make tax compliance faster, easier, more accurate, more reliable, and more valuable. We strive to make decisions as if we had a customer in the room and incessantly seek to exceed our promise to our customers. We’re empathetic to their needs at every step of their journey with us.
Our Winning Culture
Working here will challenge everyone. We strive to be the best version of ourselves and to constantly set the bar higher. We seek to recruit the best people, empower them to do their best work, and reward outstanding performers.
Avalara has been different from day one. We disrupted a stagnant industry by enabling businesses of all sizes to automate their tax calculation and compliance requirements. We think beyond conventional solutions and embrace new ideas that challenge industry norms.
While there’s no absolute formula for success, there is a clear list of characteristics that predict high achievement at Avalara. Our dream team is filled with Avalarians who show these traits: Ownership, Passion, Adaptability, Humility, Fun, Optimism, Curiosity, Urgency, and Simplicity.
Our Differentiated Spirit
We’ve always stood out. In the early days, Avalara’s tradeshow booth was a Tiki Hut — with beach music and orange-clad sales pros serving margaritas. We had fun and stood out in an industry full of blue and grey, with a simple message: “We make sales tax less taxing. Let Avalara free you from the drudgery so you can go to the beach or do whatever you like to do with your time.” Most Avalarians couldn’t attend our tradeshows. But they all could wear orange, and we built a Tiki Hut in our office to remind everyone that our goal is making life “less taxing, more relaxing” for customers. This spirit is infused into all our activities and is a constant reminder that we can still have fun and build friendships while working hard.
Think Big. Be Curious. Move Fast.
While our mission has always been the same, the shape of that opportunity is ever-changing. We recognize that today’s priorities can quickly become less relevant as new opportunities appear or we discover new challenges that must be addressed, so we welcome change.
Great accomplishments require thinking big, constantly asking “why?” and seeking to understand our business and our ecosystem in-depth. We look hard under the hood, refusing to accept easy answers or to assume we’ve dug to the bottom of a question. Challenging the status quo starts with knowing the underlying fundamentals of the problems we look to solve and being curious about how we might improve on the way we’ve always done things in the past.
Avalarians have a bias for action and away from committee groupthink. We act with urgency because we know if we don’t disrupt ourselves, someone else will. When making decisions we ask constituents to share feedback and buy-in. And when a decision doesn’t go our way we are comfortable with disagreeing and committing. We know that delivering elegance and simplicity can be difficult, but we refuse to succumb to the paralysis of analysis. We are here to serve our customers and partners and insist on evaluating every day against that purpose. If we underperform in that pursuit, we ask why and adjust at once to regain momentum.
Thriving at Avalara is quite simple: when you say you are going to do something, you do it. Every individual takes responsibility for delivering results for their team members and — ultimately — our customers. That means we hold ourselves accountable for the final outcomes of every project and maintain ownership from start to finish rather than working in narrow silos and assuming others will finish the job.
Every day we dream big, think big, and raise our own bar. Avalarians expect to work in concert with exceptionally talented and highly motivated colleagues, find extraordinary opportunities to climb to new heights, and build an outstanding career — whether they choose to stay at Avalara or to move on to new challenges elsewhere – with “proud to be from Avalara” listed on their resume.
