Sr. Sales Security Engineer

What You'll Do

Role Summary

Avalara is seeking a Senior Security Sales Engineer to join our Engineering Security team, supporting Avalara’s SaaS offerings throughout the customer engagement lifecycle. This role serves as a senior customer-facing security expert, partnering closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Legal to communicate Avalara’s security capabilities, address customer security and privacy requirements, and help accelerate enterprise sales opportunities.

Working alongside the VP of Product Security and Sales leadership, this individual will help scale Avalara’s customer trust program by supporting complex customer engagements, influencing product security capabilities, and strengthening repeatable security assurance processes. This role reports to the VP of Product Security with a matrix relationship to Sales.

How This Role Elevates Avalara

This role will:

• Increase customer confidence in Avalara’s security, privacy, and AI governance capabilities throughout the sales process.
• Improve enterprise deal velocity by reducing friction associated with customer security reviews and third-party risk assessments.
• Influence product and engineering teams by identifying recurring customer security requirements and market opportunities.
• Strengthen collaboration between Security, Sales, Legal, and Engineering to improve consistency and scalability.
• Advance Avalara’s AI-first strategy by helping customers understand our AI security and governance approach.
• Raise technical capability across Sales Engineering through mentorship, documentation, and repeatable best practices.

What Your Responsibilities Will Be

Responsibilities

The successful candidate will:

• Partner with Sales teams to identify security considerations, technical risks, and potential objections throughout the sales cycle.
• Lead customer security reviews, trust discussions, and technical security presentations for enterprise customers.
• Provide consultative guidance on security architecture, integrations, privacy, and compliance requirements related to Avalara’s SaaS platform.
• Partner with Product Management and Engineering to communicate customer security requirements and influence future platform capabilities.
• Support Sales Engineering by developing responses to RFPs, RFIs, third-party risk assessments, and customer security questionnaires.
• Assist Legal during customer contract negotiations involving privacy, information security, and AI-related contractual terms.
• Develop scalable security assurance content, documentation, and customer-facing enablement materials.
• Mentor Sales Engineering teams on security positioning, customer engagement, and technical communication.

12-Month Success Signals

Within the first 12 months, this leader will:

• Improve customer confidence through consistent, high-quality security engagements across enterprise opportunities.
• Establish scalable RFP and third-party risk response processes that improve response quality and reduce turnaround times.
• Increase reuse of security assurance content across Sales Engineering.
• Successfully support strategic enterprise opportunities requiring complex security and compliance discussions.
• Strengthen collaboration between Sales, Product, Engineering, and Legal to improve customer outcomes.
• Become a trusted internal resource for application security, cloud security, privacy, and AI security.

What You’ll Need To Be Successful

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Security, or a related technical discipline and 8+ years of relevant experience in technical pre-sales, security consulting, systems engineering, or security architecture.
• Experience supporting enterprise SaaS sales cycles involving multiple technical and business stakeholders.
• Strong understanding of cybersecurity controls, including cloud security, identity and access management, data protection, encryption, and network security.
• Working knowledge of security and compliance frameworks including NIST CSF, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, GDPR, and ISO 42001.
• Experience communicating technical security concepts to both technical and executive audiences.
• Strong understanding of enterprise cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or OCI.
• Demonstrated experience using AI technologies to improve business outcomes and customer engagement.
• Strong written, presentation, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• CISSP, CCSP, Google Cloud Architect, AWS Security