Senior Director, People Analytics

The Senior Director, People Analytics leads the team responsible for delivering data, insights, and predictive analytics across Avalara’s People & Culture organization. This role owns the enterprise strategy and execution for our People Analytics roadmap, positioning the function as a proactive, high-impact strategic partner to the CPO and senior leadership. The Senior Director cultivates trusted advisory relationships with executives, People & Culture leaders, and FP&A to drive workforce decisions, surface trends before they become challenges, and connect talent strategy directly to business outcomes. 

At this stage, the Senior Director leads the function with an enterprise lens—setting direction, building organizational capability, and driving influence at the C-suite level—while remaining willing to roll up their sleeves on the highest-stakes work. They raise the bar for what “good” looks like, build a team that owns the majority of analytical execution, and establish People Analytics as a function the business seeks out rather than simply responds to.

• Define and own Avalara’s People Analytics enterprise strategy, setting a multi-year vision, roadmap priorities, and measurable outcomes that directly align with talent strategy and business goals. 

• Operate at multiple levels—guiding and reviewing the team’s work, establishing clear quality standards, and when stakes or timelines demand it, diving into the data (writing SQL, shaping datasets, refining dashboards) to unblock work or model what “good” looks like. 

• Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team, cultivating both deep technical capability and strong consultative and communication skills; create a talent pipeline that scales with organizational complexity. 

• Act as a hands-on analytics leader when needed, personally driving key analyses, SQL work, and model development to maintain quality and unblock critical deliverables in a lean team environment. 

• Build trusted, advisory-level partnerships with the CPO, senior P&C leaders, FP&A, and business executives—bringing a clear, evidence-based point of view, proactively surfacing insights, and pushing back to reset expectations when needed, including protecting capacity for foundational analytics work. 

• Deliver high-quality analytical work on tight timelines in complex, ambiguous environments; set clear expectations, make firm prioritization calls, and communicate tradeoffs transparently even when some stakeholders are unhappy. 

• Own the design, evolution, and continuous improvement of dashboards, scorecards, and self-service reporting tools that give leaders real-time visibility into workforce trends. 

• Drive advanced analytics initiatives—including attrition modeling, workforce planning, and organizational health diagnostics—and translate outputs into strategic recommendations that influence executive decisions. 

• Ensure the integrity, privacy, and governance of people data in close partnership with PeopleTech, Legal, and P&C, establishing standards that scale across the function. 

• Translate complex data into clear, compelling narratives that drive strategic action; communicate with precision and confidence to executive audiences. 

• Balance methodological rigor with pragmatism; prioritize actionable, business-relevant insights and resist over-engineering solutions when speed and clarity are what the business needs. 

• Consistently deliver high-quality work products—both personally and through the team—on aggressive timelines; define and hold the team to clear SLAs for executives and P&C leaders. 

• Translate ambiguous, high-priority asks into concrete analytical plans with defined scope, owners, milestones, and timelines; maintain rigorous program management across the team’s full portfolio. 

• Demonstrate resilience and grit in high-change, high-ambiguity environments; anchor the team to priorities, model a solutions-oriented mindset, and sustain forward momentum despite setbacks. 

• 8+ years of experience in People Analytics or a closely related field  

• 3+ years of experience managing and developing high-performing teams  

• Proven ability to operate with urgency and bias to action, with concrete examples of shipping impactful analytics quickly in fast-changing settings.  

• Experience as an analytics player-coach: has personally done complex analytics work in prior roles and now uses that depth to set standards, coach the team, review work product, and selectively step in on high-impact or blocked work.  

• Strong project management and self-management discipline, with a track record of staying organized across multiple initiatives and closing the loop on commitments.  

• Advanced proficiency in SQL and core data-wrangling, with experience designing datasets and building production-quality dashboards (e.g., Power BI); technical skills for this role will be validated through a practical SQL and analytics assessment as part of the hiring process.  

• Proven ability to lead analytics initiatives that drive business and talent strategy.  

• Brings a strong, informed point of view and contributes to productive debate and decision-making.  

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience   

• Advanced technical and AI proficiency (see more below)

• Background in fast-paced, global, or technology-driven organizations  

Avalara Success Traits  

• Ownership – Ownership is about accountability — we are all accountable for delivering results to our customers. We work hard and smart to get the job done well every time. We take responsibility for decisions, own projects from start to finish, and never make excuses.  

• Curiosity – We ask "why?" every day and don't stop until we understand. If our ambitions are not audacious, then we are not pushing ourselves hard enough. We proactively look for problems to solve, refusing to accept easy answers, and we exercise great creativity in finding efficient ways to solve them.  

• Simplicity – Simplicity is our business, and we refuse to pass the burden of complexity to our customers — internal or external. We understand how to take complex problems and break them down into manageable parts. We always strive to accomplish more with less and let the needs of our customers and partners drive our actions.  

• We will give you access to tools, real training, and support to grow your skills and build a culture where innovation is part of the job.  

  In practice, this means you will:  

  • Demonstrate advanced proficiency with AI tools in analytics workflows (e.g., using AI to accelerate SQL/data work, automate reporting, generate and test hypotheses, and sharpen storytelling).  

  • Guide and upskill the team on responsible, high-impact AI use such as setting standards, reviewing AI-assisted work, and coaching on when and how to rely on AI vs. traditional methods.  

  • Redesign processes (not just add tools) so that AI meaningfully changes how we prioritize work, deliver insights, and partner with stakeholders.