Sr. Director, Value Creation Insights

What You'll Do

The Sr. Director, Value Creation Insights leads the analytics and insights function responsible for translating Avalara's commercial data into decisions that drive revenue growth, improve go-to-market efficiency, and advance the company's strategic priorities. This role sits at the intersection of analytics, operations, and strategy, owning a team of analysts, thought leaders, and analytics engineers who collectively serve as the quantitative backbone of Avalara. The team is approximately 30 people, blending onshore and offshore talent across multiple time zones, and the Sr. Director is expected to lead a globally distributed organization with the same rigor, cadence, and quality bar as a fully onshore team.

This is a highly cross-functional leadership role. The Sr. Director operates as a trusted advisor to senior executives across Sales, Marketing, Finance, Accounting, and Revenue Operations, and is expected to independently identify opportunities, build consensus across stakeholders, and drive analytical initiatives from inception through to adoption.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

Revenue & Forecasting Analytics

• Own the design and maintenance of Avalara's revenue forecasting models, including providing feedback on policy and revenue recognition
• Lead development and governance of the demand generation reporting platform, which will serve as the company's primary source of truth for funnel performance including opportunity stage tracking, TOFU metrics, and marketing pipeline KPIs
• Partner with FP&A on forecast methodology, variance analysis, and reconciliation
• Drive identification and resolution of forecast discrepancies, including being the driver of discovery and remediation of any assumption misses

Predictive Modeling & Scoring

• Lead the design and ongoing evolution of Avalara's prospect and customer scoring ecosystem, including product fit scores (A–D grade), propensity-to-buy models, ICP scoring\, and customer health metrics
• Own the alignment process across GTM stakeholders to define model success metrics, validate predictive performance, and ensure score adoption by Marketing, Sales Development, and Sales
• Drive operationalization of scoring tools by ensuring models are not only built but actively embedded into sales workflows, SDR outreach, prospect targeting, and account prioritization

Data Infrastructure & Governance

• Oversee the team's analytics engineering function, including Fivetran-based ingestion, dbt model development, Snowflake schema design, and data pipeline quality for commercial datasets
• Own the integration and governance of third-party data sources including ZoomInfo, Cognism, D&B, and Clay
• Manage Snowflake data access, permissions, and ingestion pipelines for commercial data domains (Salesforce, Gong, Google Ads, AvaTax, Marketo, and more)
• Partner with the Data Platform Engineering team on infrastructure decisions, the migration off legacy Hex / Power BI reporting onto Omni Analytics, and capacity planning
• Own governance of core metric definitions and calculation logic (e.g., funnel stages, scoring inputs, forecast components) that feed into company-wide KPIs, ensuring consistency between this team's models and the definitions maintained centrally by GAI

AI-Enabled Analytics & Platform Modernization

• Own and drive the AI roadmap for the team's analytical domains (forecasting, scoring, GTM/commercial analytics), defining where LLM-powered insight generation, conversational analytics, and agentic workflows create real business leverage
• Lead the team's transition from traditional dashboard-based BI (Hex, Power BI) to Omni Analytics as the semantic layer and conversational analytics interface, including model/metric layer design so that natural-language querying returns governed, trustworthy answers
• Design and ship AI agents embedded directly into GTM, Finance, and Sales workflows (e.g., automated deal/account insights, forecast variance flags, scoring explainability) rather than standalone reporting, with clear ownership of accuracy, guardrails, and adoption
• Evaluate build-vs-buy tradeoffs for AI/LLM tooling, balancing speed, cost, data security, and long-term flexibility, and bring recommendations to the VP with a clear point of view

Stakeholder Partnership & Executive Communication

• Serve as the analytics partner to senior leadership across Revenue Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Finance, translating complex analytical outputs into clear, actionable narratives
• Drive cross-functional alignment on key company metrics including OKR definitions, MBO criteria, and performance measurement frameworks
• Present analytical findings, forecast updates, and strategic recommendations directly to VP and C-suite stakeholders
• Build and maintain a formal operating model with FP&A that ensures a single source of analytical truth reaches executive leadership

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead and develop a team of roughly 30, including direct reports at the analyst to principal analyst level plus analytics engineers, across prospect analytics, value creation, marketing analytics, financial insights, and AI-enabled analytics, spanning onshore and offshore locations
• Build and manage a globally distributed team model, including offshore hiring, onboarding, and time-zone-aware working norms that keep quality, security, and stakeholder responsiveness consistent regardless of location
• Own performance management, goal setting, and career development for team members
• Establish team prioritization processes, sprint cadences, and stakeholder intake workflows
• Set technical and analytical standards for the team, including coding practices, modeling methodology, documentation, and reproducibility

Strategic Initiatives

• Identify and drive high-priority analytical initiatives proactively by not simply responding to requests, but surfacing opportunities where data can create business value and taking ownership of moving those opportunities to action
• Lead complex, organization-wide data transitions and knowledge transfers while protecting business partner continuity
• Represent the team's AI-enabled analytics work in company-wide AI and automation forums, and bring back emerging tooling, patterns, and risks relevant to the team's roadmap

What Success Looks Like

Business partners proactively seek out the team's analytical perspective before making key decisions

• Scoring models and analytical tools are embedded in day-to-day GTM workflows
• Business partners get trustworthy answers via conversational analytics and embedded AI agents for a majority of routine questions, freeing the team to focus on higher-value analysis
• Forecasts and models are methodologically sound, documented, and reproducible with clear telemetry connecting analytical work to business outcomes
• The team operates with transparency: work is documented, peer-reviewed, and can be picked up by any team member
• Executive leadership has a single, trusted analytical foundation that serves as the ground for insights and narrative

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in analytics, data science, or data engineering, with at least 4 years in a people management role
• Deep expertise in Snowflake, SQL, dbt, and modern data stack tooling; experience with Omni, Power BI, Hex, or similar BI/semantic-layer platforms
• Hands-on experience with LLM-powered / conversational analytics tools and building AI agents or automated workflows on top of a governed data model (vs. one-off prompting); able to distinguish genuine analytical leverage from AI novelty
• Experience building and managing distributed teams that blend onshore and offshore talent across time zones, with a track record of sustaining quality, security, and stakeholder trust at that scale
• Strong command of statistical modeling, predictive analytics, and machine learning concepts applied to commercial use cases
• Proven ability to work with and influence senior stakeholders across multiple functions
• Experience owning complex, multi-stakeholder analytical initiatives from problem framing through to business adoption
• Exceptional communication skills with strong ability to translate technical output into executive-ready narratives
• SaaS business model fluency, including ARR, GRR, NRR, bookings, revenue recognition, and GTM funnel mechanics
• Experience with Salesforce data, marketing automation platforms, and CRM analytics a strong plus

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.