Running a Large-Scale SaaS Platform

Danny Fields (CTO/EVP @Avalara) talks about operating large SaaS environments, customizations for customer demands, and transitioning from traditional software. 

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SHOW NOTES:

• Avalara - Tax Compliance Software for your industry
• Danny Fields - EVP and CTO Engineering

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. You’ve got a very broad background in engineering and leadership roles. Can you share with us a little bit of your evolution, and where you focus your time at Avalara?

Topic 2 - Give us a little bit of background on Avalara (SaaS for Tax Compliance), and a little bit of details on what it means to run a SaaS platform for such a complex product offering? 

Topic 3 - You’ve been involved in a number of different SaaS platforms over the years. What are some of the biggest changes and challenges you face in running modern SaaS platforms today?

Topic 4 - Taxes are a very complex ecosystem, especially with all the variants around the world. How does a product team think about balancing the desire to deliver a consistent experience (SaaS operations) and customer demands for uniqueness?

Topic 5 - How do you think about balancing optimizations around Operations and taking advantage of all the new innovations happening in open-source, or from the cloud-providers, or just internal capabilities from your team? 

Topic 6 - Any tips for anyone looking to get into SaaS operations, or transitions from traditional data center software delivery? 

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