Avalara hired Danny Fields, an experienced engineering leader and cloud tech veteran, to be its new chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering.
Fields has 28 years of engineering and leadership experience, most recently serving as chief software development officer at MobileIron, a mobile device management company based in San Francisco. He worked at Oracle for a combined 24 years across multiple stints, leading teams in locations throughout the world, building complex enterprise cloud and on-premise solutions.
“Danny brings a highly sought-after combination of time-tested engineering skills and leadership to Avalara,” Avalara CEO Scott McFarlane said. “Our customers require reliability and efficiency in our products. They expect us to deliver innovation within our products to keep pace with the accelerating complexity of tax. Danny will lead our distributed technology teams to achieve and exceed our promises for customers.”
Fields stepped into the new role this week, replacing former CTO and EVP of engineering Peter Horadan, who left the company earlier this year. At the time, Avalara said it had decided to centralize development and engineering under one leader.
Fields entry to Avalara comes at an important time, as the sales tax automation company gets set to go public. The 14-year-old company, which is number one on the GeekWire 200, filed earlier this month to raise up to $150 million through an initial public offering.
