VP, Finance & Strategy TCO

What You’ll Do

Vice President, Finance & Strategy — Technology and Customer Operations (TCO)

Reports to SVP Finance & Strategy | Supports TCO Executive Leadership (Engineering, IT, Customer Operations)

About TCO

Technology and Customer Operations (TCO) is Avalara's largest organization with roughly 60% of company headcount and 100% of company Cost of Revenue. TCO is not one business but three, each carrying a distinct investor narrative: Engineering, Customer Operations and Information Technology.

Overview

Avalara is seeking a Vice President of Finance & Strategy to serve as the senior finance executive for TCO — a strategic economics owner and mini-CFO to TCO's leadership, not a reporting function. This role builds and leads an eventual five person FP&A team, and is personally accountable for the economics questions today: cost-to-serve, product profitability, capacity economics, gross-margin durability, and AI spend ROI.

This is a build mandate as much as a run mandate: shifting TCO finance from a clerk relationship (producing reports for expense-category owners) to an economics-ownership model, in which category owners carry their own forecasts to an FP&A standard while this role's team owns the questions that cut across categories. The person in this seat sets the standard, negotiates FP&A's seat at the table with exec leaders, and is the person Execs will turn to when questions arise about R&D efficiency or gross-margin durability.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

Strategic Vision & Economic Ownership (≈ core mandate)

• Lead the shift from category-based expense reporting to owning TCO's core economics — cost-to-serve, product profitability, capacity economics, gross-margin durability, and AI spend ROI.
• Set the long-range financial strategy for TCO, translating spend across three distinct P&L narratives into a single, coherent investment and efficiency story for the CFO, CEO, and Vista/Board.
• Define and govern TCO's forecasting standard — methodology, cadence, and materiality thresholds — while holding category owners (professional fees, colocation, headcount, etc.) accountable for producing and carrying their own forecast inputs against that standard.
• Own the build-out of TCO's most consequential narratives: the Cost of Revenue / cost-to-serve model (35% of TCO spend) and consolidated visibility into fast-growing AI/token spend.

Organizational Leadership & Team Build

• Build, lead, and develop a five-person FP&A pod structure: a Director accountable for cross-TCO spend intentionality and cross-org project economics, and three Senior Manager/Manager economics leads covering Engineering, Customer Operations and Information Technology.
• Hold overall control over planning, staffing, and expense priorities for the TCO finance function, including hiring, leveling, and career progression (e.g., developing a Manager-level hire into a Senior Manager role).
• Establish and enforce the structural rule that separates relationships, accountability narratives, and reporting views so each owns a vertical leader relationship while one person remains accountable end-to-end for each cross-cutting economics story.

Business & Executive Partnership

• Serve as the primary strategic finance partner to TCO's exec leadership and the VP, TCO Chief of Staff — who holds TCO's budget authority — operating as a trusted advisor and economics owner rather than a reporting function.
• Secure standing FP&A representation in category-owner budget reviews (e.g., colocation, headcount) using completed unit-economics models as the evidence base

• Set the expectation, at the EVP/Chief of Staff level, that category owners are accountable for their own forecast quality and cadence.

Governance, Standards & Risk

• Govern the reporting standard (package structure, variance taxonomy, materiality thresholds, action-log format, and forecast assumptions register).
• Establish accountability mechanisms for forecast misses — automatic escalation thresholds and a shared, named-validator assumptions register — to correct a track record of inaccurate and late category-owner forecasts.
• Stand up governance for TCO's project portfolio, including a business-case standard and two-sided, jointly-computed ROI tracking for cross-org project work that is currently ungoverned.

Executive & Board Communication

• Translate TCO's economics into clear, value-lever-based narratives for CFO, CEO, and Board-level audiences; own the monthly Product P&L (cost side) as a board-committed deliverable.
• Represent TCO in company-wide FP&A, AOP, and Vista reporting processes, ensuring the organization's story is credible and fully integrated into Avalara's enterprise-level financial narrative.

What You'll Need to be Successful

• 15+ years of progressive FP&A, corporate finance, or product-line finance leadership experience, including direct people-management of a multi-person finance team; SaaS or high-growth technology experience strongly preferred.
• Proven track record building and scaling a finance function from a reporting/clerk model into an economics-ownership model — comfortable operating as a strategic finance executive to EVP/C-level leaders, not a reporting analyst.
• Deep experience with cost-to-serve, unit economics, product P&L, and capacity/margin modeling across engineering, delivery, and infrastructure cost pools.
• Demonstrated ability to design and stand up an FP&A operating model and pod structure, including hiring, leveling, and developing Directors and Senior Managers.
• Strong technical fluency in financial planning systems (e.g., Pigment, Adaptive, Anaplan) and analytics platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Power BI, Tableau, Omni); SQL a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to apply AI tools (e.g., Claude, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate modeling, reporting, and analytics as an augmentation layer that speeds up execution and sharpens insight, not a replacement for financial judgment.
• Exceptional executive communication and storytelling skills — able to translate complex, multi-business-unit data into clear, value-lever-based narratives for CFO, CEO, and Board-level audiences.
• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or related field; MBA or CFA preferred.

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.