As a DevOps Engineer at Avalara, you are at the center of a highly complex SaaS ecosystem designed to automate tax compliance for businesses worldwide. Avalara processes billions of real-time transactions with millisecond latency, meaning that infrastructure stability, performance, and scalability are critical to the company's core value proposition. Your role is not just about maintaining pipelines; it is about building resilient, self-healing infrastructure that can handle massive transaction spikes during peak retail seasons.

In this position, you will work closely with software engineering, product, and security teams to design, deploy, and maintain cloud infrastructure. The team operates in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment, managing complex deployments across AWS, Azure, and legacy environments. You will be responsible for driving automation, implementing robust Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and establishing strict site reliability engineering (SRE) practices to minimize downtime and optimize resource utilization.

This role requires a unique blend of deep systems knowledge, software engineering discipline, and a proactive mindset. You will have the opportunity to influence architectural decisions, scale delivery pipelines, and work on cutting-edge cloud technologies. For engineers who thrive on solving complex distributed systems problems at scale, this position offers a highly challenging and rewarding career path.

The questions you will encounter during the Avalara interviewing process are designed to test your hands-on technical capabilities, architectural thinking, and problem-solving methodologies. These questions are drawn from real candidate experiences and reflect the actual technical challenges you will face on the job. Use them to identify patterns in how the engineering team evaluates talent, rather than simply memorizing answers.

Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Platforms

This category evaluates your ability to provision, manage, and scale cloud infrastructure securely and efficiently using modern automation tools.

• How do you manage state files in Terraform when working across large, distributed teams?
• Describe a scenario where you had to debug a failing Terraform deployment. How did you identify the root cause?

To succeed in the Avalara interview process, you must demonstrate a balance of technical expertise, architectural vision, and collaborative capability. The hiring team evaluates candidates across several core pillars to ensure they can thrive in a fast-paced, high-scale environment.

Technical Mastery (Cloud & IaC) – You must show a deep, hands-on understanding of cloud platforms and infrastructure automation. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to write clean, scalable Terraform code and your familiarity with managing complex cloud workloads. Be ready to explain the "why" behind your technical choices.

System Design & SRE Principles – You need to demonstrate that you design infrastructure with reliability, scalability, and security in mind. This involves understanding how to architect systems that fail gracefully, scale dynamically, and provide clear observability through logging and metrics.

Problem-Solving & Adaptability – The team values engineers who can navigate ambiguity and solve complex, open-ended problems. You will be evaluated on how you deconstruct difficult scenarios, analyze trade-offs, and propose pragmatic solutions under constraints.

Collaboration & Cultural Alignment – At Avalara, DevOps is a collaborative culture, not just a job title. You must show that you can communicate technical concepts clearly, work effectively with cross-functional partners, and accept constructive feedback during technical discussions.

The interview process for a DevOps Engineer at Avalara is comprehensive and rigorous, designed to thoroughly evaluate your technical depth and cultural fit. Candidates should prepare for a multi-stage journey that tests both hands-on engineering capabilities and high-level architectural thinking. The process typically moves through initial conversations to a practical take-home assignment, culminating in a series of deep-dive technical and behavioral interviews.

The journey begins with a standard recruiter screen followed by a highly technical discussion with the hiring manager. Once you pass these initial stages, you will be given a hands-on take-home DevOps assignment. This assignment is a critical component of the evaluation process, and your submission will serve as the foundation for several discussions in the final loop. The final round consists of multiple consecutive interviews focusing on system design, coding, SRE scenarios, and leadership alignment.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial contact to the final decision. Candidates should use this visualization to pace their preparation, ensuring they allocate sufficient time to complete the take-home assignment to a high standard. Be aware that because the loop involves multiple stakeholders—including senior engineering leadership—scheduling can sometimes take one to two weeks between stages.

To excel in the Avalara loop, you must understand exactly what is expected in each core technical evaluation area. The interviewers are looking for practical, real-world engineering experience rather than theoretical knowledge.

Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Platforms

This area evaluates your capability to build, manage, and scale secure cloud infrastructure. Avalara relies heavily on automation to maintain its vast deployment footprint, making Terraform and cloud platform expertise a non-negotiable requirement.

Be ready to go over:

• Terraform Best Practices – State file management, workspace organization, modular design, and dry-run validation.
• Multi-Cloud Architecture – Key differences and integration strategies between AWS and Azure services.
• Security & Compliance – Implementing least-privilege IAM policies, managing secrets securely, and ensuring network isolation.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Multi-region active-active setups, cross-cloud networking, and managing hybrid legacy infrastructure.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a Terraform module structure that allows development teams to self-provision isolated environments while adhering to corporate security baselines."
• "How would you migrate a legacy, manually configured cloud environment to Terraform without causing service disruption?"

CI/CD & Deployment Strategy

Continuous integration and continuous deployment are the lifeblood of Avalara's development velocity. You must demonstrate that you can build reliable, automated pathways from code commit to production.

Be ready to go over:

• Pipeline Design – Structuring build, test, and deploy stages for maximum speed and reliability.
• Deployment Methodologies – Implementing blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments, including automated rollback triggers.
• Containerization – Building efficient Docker images, managing registries, and orchestrating deployments.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – GitOps workflows, dynamic environment provisioning, and pipeline-as-code optimization.

Example scenarios:

• "A critical deployment fails halfway through a canary rollout. Walk me through how your pipeline detects this and executes an automated rollback."
• "How do you optimize a build pipeline that is running slowly due to large dependency resolution phases?"

System Design & Reliability Engineering

This evaluation area tests your ability to architect high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that are resilient to failures.

Be ready to go over:

• High Availability – Eliminating single points of failure, designing auto-scaling groups, and configuring load balancers.
• Observability – Setting up effective logging, metrics collection, and distributed tracing to monitor system health.
• Database Scaling – Managing read replicas, caching layers, and database connection pooling.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Rate limiting, circuit breakers, and handling catastrophic regional cloud outages.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a monitoring and alerting system for a global API that minimizes alert fatigue while ensuring critical incidents are raised immediately."
• "How would you architect a caching layer to handle a 10x spike in read traffic during a major retail event?"

Coding & Take-Home Assignment Defense

The take-home assignment is a crucial part of the Avalara process. In this round, you will present your solution and defend your architectural choices to a panel of engineers.

Be ready to go over:

• Code Quality – Writing clean, readable, and well-documented scripts or infrastructure code.
• Scalability Enhancements – Showing how your take-home solution can be scaled up to handle enterprise-level workloads.
• Trade-off Analysis Explain why you chose specific tools or patterns over alternatives during the exercise.

Example scenarios:

• "If you had another week to work on this take-home assignment, what architecture or performance enhancements would you implement?"
• "Explain how you would modify your script to run concurrently across multiple threads or processes."