Senior Lead Software Development Engineer, AI-Enabled Data Platform
Avalara
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Jul 7, 2026
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Jul 20, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor role focused on designing and building an AI-enabled data platform for a tax compliance software company. Day-to-day work spans architecting scalable data pipelines, semantic models, and data quality frameworks, as well as developing large language model solutions — including Retrieval-Augmented Generation and agentic workflows — using tools such as Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Python, and AWS. The role also involves mentoring engineers and communicating technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
Senior level · 10+ years · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 290 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 120–430
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $142,568 (middle half $111,775–$173,013).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role sits at the intersection of data platform architecture (pipelines, semantic models, dbt/Snowflake) and applied AI/LLM engineering, making it a genuine toss-up between 15-1243 (Database Architects) and 15-1252 (Software Developers). The data-platform and semantic-layer work is the primary framing, so 15-1243 is chosen as primary with 15-1252 as the runner-up.
The JD requires a Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS/engineering 'or a related field' but does not explicitly state that equivalent experience is accepted in lieu of a degree. However, the phrasing is a common soft gate rather than a hard rejection criterion, so the degree requirement is set to None — a hiring manager should confirm whether the degree is truly eliminatory.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
The title 'Senior Lead Software Development Engineer' contains both 'Senior' and 'Lead'; the level advertised in the title is set to Senior as the dominant level signal. The actual scope (10+ years, enterprise-wide architecture, mentoring) is consistent with a Senior individual contributor, not Staff or Principal — the 'Lead' here appears to describe a player-coach model within a team rather than cross-org technical authority.
AWS is listed as a required platform alongside Snowflake; alternatives (Azure, GCP) are noted as the JD uses 'AWS' specifically without an 'or similar' qualifier, but they are included as plausible substitutes a hiring manager might accept given the cloud-agnostic nature of the broader stack.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): foundation model fine-tuning.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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