What You'll Do:
The Strategic Technical Account Manager (STAM) supports the retention and growth of Avalara’s highest-ARR customers by serving as their primary technical support resource. This role provides expert troubleshooting, proactive technical guidance, and structured engagement to ensure product stability and long-term customer success. The STAM builds trusted relationships and drives a preventative support approach that reduces risk and improves customer outcomes. The role also partners during hypercare to ensure a smooth transition from implementation to ongoing support.
How this Role Elevates Avalara (business, teams, customers)
From a business perspective, the STAM strengthens Avalara’s relationships with its highest-value customers by delivering consistent, expert technical leadership. By resolving complex issues quickly and preventing recurring risk, this role protects revenue, reduces churn exposure, and reinforces customer confidence in Avalara’s platform.
For our teams, the STAM improves operational stability and cross-functional alignment. Through structured feedback to Product and Engineering, this role helps identify systemic gaps, influence product improvements, and reduce support burden over time. Proactive engagement and risk identification support retention and expansion strategies in partnership with Customer Account Management.
For customers, the STAM provides a trusted technical partner who understands their environment, anticipates risk, and delivers clarity during high-impact situations. This proactive, relationship-driven approach increases platform reliability, improves customer experience, and drives long-term success.
What Your Responsibilities Will Be:
Responsibilities
-
Own a named portfolio of Avalara’s highest-ARR customers, serving as the primary technical support lead and trusted advisor for all post-implementation needs.
-
Resolve complex and high-impact technical issues by leading root cause analysis, coordinating cross-functional resources, and delivering timely, accurate solutions that minimize customer risk.
-
Lead incident response and escalation management, including direct customer communication and internal alignment, ensuring adherence to contractual service level agreements, including a one-hour initial response requirement and any custom SLAs.
-
Drive proactive account engagement through tailored outbound communications, technical health reviews, case trend analysis, and risk assessments to prevent recurring issues and improve platform stability.
-
Partner closely with Customer Account Management to align on strategies that support retention, expansion, and overall account health.
-
Support hypercare transitions from implementation to steady-state support, ensuring continuity and reducing disruption for strategic customers.
-
Influence product and engineering teams by providing structured customer feedback and identifying recurring technical gaps that impact customer outcomes.
12-Month Success Signals
-
Recognized by assigned enterprise customers as the trusted technical lead and primary escalation point for complex support matters, measured by best-in-class CSAT scores.
-
Consistently meet or exceed contractual service level agreements, including one-hour initial response targets, while maintaining high resolution quality for high-impact cases.
-
Reduce repeat case volume within the assigned portfolio by identifying and addressing systemic root causes.
-
Deliver structured health reviews and risk assessments that contribute to measurable improvements in account stability and customer satisfaction.
-
Influence at least three product or engineering enhancements that reduces support burden, improves platform reliability, or addresses recurring customer risk.
-
Demonstrate quantifiable AI-driven performance gains, such as faster diagnostics, improved case documentation quality, enhanced knowledge sharing, or automation of recurring technical tasks.
What You'll Need to be Successful:
AI Expectations
Avalara is an AI-first company.
We expect every engineer, manager, and leader to actively leverage AI to enhance productivity, quality, innovation, and customer value. AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products — and success at Avalara requires embracing AI as an essential capability, not an optional tool.
AI Bar Raiser Expectations
A successful STAM raises the bar with AI through the following activities:
Demonstrate advanced, applied AI expertise by delivering measurable improvements in areas such as incident resolution speed, root cause accuracy, case deflection, and customer communication quality
Identify and implement new AI-driven approaches to technical support (e.g., automated diagnostics, intelligent case triage, predictive risk identification) that go beyond current team practices
Quantify AI impact through clear metrics (e.g., reduced time to resolution, lower repeat case rates, improved SLA adherence, increased automation coverage)
Elevate team capability by sharing AI techniques, coaching peers, and establishing repeatable best practices that improve overall team performance
Drive adoption of AI at scale by embedding AI into workflows, documentation, and operational processes—not as optional tools, but as standard ways of working
Apply strong judgment in AI usage, ensuring data security, compliance, and responsible application in customer-facing and internal scenarios
Continuously assess and advance Avalara’s AI maturity within the STAM function, identifying opportunities to increase leverage, reduce manual effort, and improve customer outcomes
We are looking for a STAM to raise the bar for Avalara and our customers through:
Elevating team performance and standards through coaching, knowledge sharing, and setting a high bar for technical excellence and customer outcomes
Demonstrating strong ownership and accountability for complex, high-impact customer issues, and modeling this behavior for others
Improving systems, processes, and documentation so that the team operates more efficiently and consistently over time
Simplifying complex technical and compliance challenges in ways that improve both internal execution and customer experience
Challenging assumptions constructively and introducing better approaches that increase effectiveness and scalability
Leaving every team, process, and customer engagement stronger than they found it, contributing to increased talent density and execution rigor across the organization
Qualifications
-
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business.
-
Experience
-
5 years of experience in technical account management, customer success, or customer or partner support roles.
-
Experience supporting enterprise or high-revenue customers.
-
Experience leading complex issue resolution and coordinating cross-functional teams.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities-
Working knowledge of networking concepts, application programming interfaces, and common enterprise resource planning and eCommerce platform workflows.
-
General knowledge of SaaS-based application support models and incident management processes.
-
Ability to conduct root cause analysis and translate technical findings into clear customer communication.
-
Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to engage technical and business stakeholders.
-
Ability to manage multiple high-priority accounts while meeting defined service level agreements.
-
Strong problem-solving skills and sound judgment in high-impact customer situations.
Avalara is an AI-first Company:
AI is embedded in our workflows, decision-making, and products. Success here requires embracing AI as an essential capability.
You’ll bring experience using AI and AI-related technologies, ready to thrive here.
You’ll apply AI every day to business challenges - improving efficiency, contributing solutions, and driving results for your team, our company, and our customers.
You’ll grow with AI by staying curious about new trends and best practices, and by sharing what you learn so others can benefit too.
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 defining the relationship between tax and tech.
We’ve already built an industry-leading cloud compliance platform, processing over 54 billion customer API calls and over 6.6 million tax returns a year. Our growth is real - we're a billion dollar business - 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. 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.
