Simplifying the complicated — how everybody counts at Avalara

Avalara has seen significant expansion in Europe in recent years. They’ve been on a major hiring drive in Brighton & Hove for the last 18 months, making a big impact on the local tech scene.

I sat down with Jaime Lee-Choon (Engineering Director), Wendy Armstrong (Senior Software Engineer), Gessica Puglielli (Senior UX Designer) and Richard Vaughan (Senior Technical Writer) to find out what it’s like to work there.

Making tax less taxing

“We’re making tax easier, basically,” says Wendy.

“Avalara is all about taking this really complicated area — you can study taxes and finance and regulation for years and still not know everything — and designing products and software so people can make sense of the confusing world of tax compliance,” agrees Rich.

“The Avalara engine is used by massive names like Adidas, Apple, Converse,” explains Gess, “and we have accountancy partners like PwC and RSM, plus over 700 integrations such as Amazon, Shopify, Sage and eBay. It’s game-changing software that offers a real technology solution to global companies.”

Chances are, if you’ve bought something online recently, Avalara had a hand in it.

While plenty of people might see the brand as a finance business, the team doesn’t feel that way. They describe themselves as a software business that operates within tax.

“This is a fast-paced, high pressure and super exciting place to be,” enthuses Jaime. “We’ve only touched around 5% of our market, so there’s so much potential. We’re looking for people who want to be part of that — who are hungry and want to help make a change to the industry and add value. We need passionate people with a desire to move this forward.”

Wendy nods in agreement. “The word I’d use here is opportunity. This company is going to grow a lot, so there’s ample room for individual growth as an engineer.”

Start-up culture in a global business

Hypergrowth scale-ups often bring to mind long hours and stressful deadlines, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Everyone I spoke with is in agreement — Avalara cares a lot about its staff and bends over backwards to support them.

“The one thing I noticed is that although the work might be challenging, it’s not stressful. I really feel that I’m supported in everything I do,” says Wendy. “You’re trusted to know what you’re doing so you can get on with your job, innovate and do things. You don’t have to account for every single little moment of your day — you manage your own time and achieve your goals”.

“Line managers are very supportive, but also trust you to get the work done, and treat you like an adult” confirms Richard. “From what I’ve seen, micromanagement isn’t a thing here — everyone has been awesome and friendly, and the way they transferred to working at home has been very well received”.

Most companies showed their true colours during lockdown — we’ve all heard or seen firsthand the horror stories to come out of the forced transition to working from home. But it doesn’t sound like this has been a problem for Avalara.

“When COVID happened, the outpouring of support from leaders actually surprised me,” says Jaime. “It wasn’t just a ‘hey, work from home, look after yourselves’ sort of thing, it was more, ‘we’re going to get some industry experts in to give talks on how to cope with this mentally, and how to lead people remotely’, all this kind of stuff.”

Gess agrees. “We were encouraged to pace ourselves to our own needs — the feeling throughout lockdown was that we were trusted and supported. Avalara put out learning courses, online social events, support for parents who were homeschooling — it really went an extra mile to help people out during a very tough time.”

It’s not just during lockdown that the business has demonstrated and lived by its values. “During this year’s Black Lives Matter movement, Avalara charged every leader with a 21-day challenge,” explains Jaime. “Over the next 21 days, do something — educate yourself, learn about a new culture, improve yourself. The fact that the business actively encouraged us to take time out of our days to do that, to me, summarises the culture that sets us apart from other places. Other organisations paid lip service, while here we saw action.”

Delivering software at scale

When it comes to doing what Avalara does best, it’s clear that the business has in many respects retained it’s start-up roots. “We’re very agile and very relaxed,” says Gess. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t work hard, but it’s a big company that doesn’t feel like a big company. It’s very chilled, and not as stiff, boring or as dry as you might expect from a fintech company.”

The business is also very product lead. “We have three main product streams in EMEA, and each product has at least one Product Manager, with me as a UX Designer and Researcher. We have other Product Owners focusing on Amazon integrations, then in the US, it’s a little more complicated — there’s a lot! Basically, we’re very product led”.

Engineering teams operate across the stack. “It depends on which team, but we don’t tend to split out our devs and our QA — everyone is T-shaped, with the aim to be cross-functional across the organisation,” says Jaime.

“Learning is huge here, so there are always opportunities to upskill — either through pair programming or rotations through teams. Even though people haven’t been here that long, we’ve already had someone rotate around a couple of teams to grow their knowledge. We have a backlog of user stories that people can pick up in order, and there’s the opportunity to spend time learning from others so it’ll help the team’s skills grow.”

Wendy agrees. “I’ve worked for places where doing a release is just a gamble — you don’t necessarily have good infrastructure in place, and the people who are in charge of the infra point their finger in a different direction and say ‘it’s not my job’. That just doesn’t happen here. Everybody is committed and owns what they do.”

“Technology-wise, we’re a .NET Core stack, with enterprise service buses, messaging services and microservices,” continues Wendy. “Front-end, we’re standardising to React, with some legacy Angular, but anything new will be React. You’ll also find AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, RabbitMQ — all that juicy stuff!”

“Consistency in how we approach what we use. There’s still freedom to adopt new tech, but we try not to all go off down our own paths. We have an architectural team that has ongoing discussions and is always open to suggestions.”

Next year, Jaime notes that the engineering team will be really focusing on efficiency and growth. “How do we take what began as a start-up, evolve it, and make it more efficient, scalable and stable? When we start adding more partners and transactions, it has to be focused on performance, stability and growth. We just need to look at how we can be more efficient — particularly around Agile and automation.”

Perks and benefits

Brighton is Avalara’s EMEA hub and the only office in the UK — of its 3,000 global staff, nearly 300 are based here, and the majority have joined in the last 18 months. The business’ offices, while closed at the moment, are based in Trafalgar Place, near the North Laine. While it sounds as if the team is in no rush to head back in, Gess is really looking forward to the gradual return to the office.

“In Brighton, it’s a very cool workplace. I know we’re all working from home at the moment, but if you think of the offices, they’re located in one of the coolest business hubs in Brighton, and we’ve got three massive floors, with an amazing Tiki Bar with free food and drinks all week — there’s unlimited Kombucha, too, which sells it for me!”

There’s plenty on offer in terms of benefits, too. There are financial bonuses, discounts at shops and restaurants and there’s free travel, private health and dental insurance.

“We pay really well for Brighton,” says Wendy. “I was freelancing before and didn’t think I’d ever go back to permanent work again, but Avalara pays well above the majority of Brighton salaries. If you factor in the cost of season tickets, it’s pretty close to London wages.”

Going forward

“There’s huge scope for changes next year,” explains Richard. “We’re still relatively young in Europe, so if we compare the market with what we’ve done in the US, we’re only scraping the surface of what we can do over here.”

There are few firms in Brighton that are growing at the rate of Avalara. The business has been hiring consistently throughout lockdown, too — a rarity at the moment.

Richard joined the team two weeks after lockdown started. This was a stressful time for most of us — never mind for those starting a new job, too. Luckily, Avalara did everything it could to reassure him. “My onboarding was awesome — my HR contact checked in regularly, making sure everything was cool and I had all the equipment I needed, and every interaction I had reassured me that everything was okay.”

And as for the future? “We’re very lucky,” continues Richard. “We operate in a recession-proof market — taxes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon!”

If you’re interested in finding out more about Avalara, take a look at the business’ website, or reach out to Jaime, Wendy, Gessica or Richard directly.

Luke Thompson is Digital Lead for Hays Tech in Brighton, the leading technology recruiters in Sussex. Have a question for him? Find him on LinkedIn, Twitter or Luke.Thompson@hays.com.