The Senior Director of Customer Onboarding is a strategic and operational leader responsible for designing, scaling, and optimizing a world-class onboarding experience that accelerates time-to-value and drives long-term customer success. This leader will define the vision, strategy, and execution framework for onboarding across customer segments, ensuring seamless transitions from sales to implementation and ongoing success. They will oversee onboarding methodology, process standardization, enablement, tooling, and performance metrics, while partnering cross-functionally with Sales, Product, Customer Success, Support, and Operations to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer journey. The role requires a data-driven approach to improving onboarding rates, reducing implementation cycle times, and increasing early-stage retention.

The ideal candidate is an experienced people leader who can build and scale high-performing, customer-centric teams in complex, fast-paced environments. They will establish clear KPIs, drive operational rigor, and implement continuous improvement initiatives to enhance efficiency and customer outcomes. This individual must balance strategic vision with hands-on execution, influencing executive stakeholders while coaching frontline leaders. Strong change management, executive communication, and customer engagement skills are essential, as the Senior Director will play a critical role in shaping the company’s reputation during the most pivotal phase of the customer lifecycle—onboarding.

Come join this exciting team!

• In this job you will be an AI Bar Raiser, improving customer experience and team performance through automation. You will play an integral role in evaluating and launching tools leveraging AI to go faster in driving improvement.

• You will have a strong background leading teams in operations, customer experience, or customer support.
• Build a strong workplace culture and engaged teams.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver solutions to complex situations or problem sets.
• Inspiring leader who is not afraid to innovate to provide value to the business.
• Excellent team player, who values other’s views and can earn stakeholder confidence quickly.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in fast-paced environment, work collaboratively with cross-functional teams, and ensure high quality deliverables with high attention to detail.
• Experience employing start-up principles to a growth focused business, contributing to developing business infrastructure and aggressively scaling in a high growth environment.

• 4-year Technical degree.
• 15+ years of leadership experience.
• 5+ years of broad-based tech industry experience, Saas experience preferred.

• Proven experience leading a large Operations function.
• Experience evaluating and launching AI and automation tools to drive efficiency.

• Excellent written and interpersonal communication and collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with SaaS solutions and cloud technology.
• Capability evaluating and leveraging AI tools for team use and efficiency.
• Proven ability to lead and manage at senior levels.
• Experience leading Operations teams in a customer facing environment.
• Strong problem-solving skills: ability to diagnose process and technology improvement opportunities and clearly articulate potential.
• Background in process improvement, including Lean Six Sigma.
• Strong attention to detail, passion for strategic thinking and problem solving, and ability to deliver rich, business insights to drive business decisions.

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.

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.

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.