Senior Lead AI Engineer, Klaviyo
$216-324k
3+ days a week in office (Palo Alto, CA)
The B2C CRM
Be an early applicant
$216-324k
3+ days a week in office (Palo Alto, CA)
1001+ employees
Company mission
Klaviyo is the only CRM built for B2C brands. Powered by its built-in data platform and AI insights, Klaviyo combines marketing automation, analytics, and customer service into one unified solution, making it easy for businesses to know their customers and grow faster.
Role
Who you are
- If you’re a close but not exact match with the description, we hope you’ll still consider applying
- Seasoned backend engineer & tech lead. ~8+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend and distributed systems; you’ve led complex projects or areas end‑to‑end and acted as the go‑to technical owner for key services
- Hands‑on with generative & agentic AI in production. You’ve built and shipped generative or agentic AI applications (e.g., LLM‑backed flows, tool‑using agents, retrieval‑augmented systems) and are comfortable with prompt design, few‑shot approaches, fine‑tuning, and evaluation
- Deep experience with large‑scale distributed systems. You’ve architected and operated reliable services, async processing pipelines, and distributed task queues (e.g., Celery, Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, Redis) supporting high‑throughput workloads
- Strong Python and data tooling fluency. Proficient in Python and modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, Django or similar), with experience using big data tools such as Spark/Hadoop and ORMs like SQLAlchemy/Alembic
- Production‑grade cloud experience. Comfortable with AWS and Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and operational best practices; you treat infrastructure choices as part of the system design, not an afterthought
- Evaluation and quality‑obsessed. You’ve designed human and automated evals for AI systems, know how to instrument for quality, and understand how to balance latency, cost, and response quality in real‑world usage
- Technical leader, not just individual contributor. You influence architecture beyond your own code, facilitate design reviews, rally cross‑functional partners, and help teams converge on pragmatic decisions in ambiguous spaces
- Collaborative and customer‑first. You’re comfortable collaborating directly with PMs, ML engineers, and customers; you can translate between customer needs, product goals, and technical constraints, and you care deeply about the customer experience
- You’ve already been effectively practicing agentic coding in your daily work. You’re hungry to responsibly explore new AI tools and workflows, finding ways to make your work smarter and more efficient
- Bonus: You use AI tools to accelerate exploration, shorten iteration cycles, and bring sharper ideas to the table—for yourself and your teammates
Desirable
- Prior experience training and deploying ML models (including RL or RLHF) into production systems that drove measurable business impact
- Experience building shared AI/ML platforms or services used by multiple product teams
- Background in marketing tech, ecommerce, or other domains where customer data, personalization, and experimentation are central
What the job involves
- As a Sr Lead AI Engineer in the AI & Analytics organization, you’ll be the technical leader for a set of high‑impact AI services and agentic systems
- You’ll own architecture and execution for complex, distributed backend systems; guide other engineers through design and implementation; and partner closely with product, machine learning, and data science to turn AI ideas into reliable, scalable production capabilities
- This is a hands-on tech lead role, not a people‑manager role
- You’ll help shape how Palo Alto collaborates with Boston and global teams, and open up clear paths for growth into broader technical leadership, staff/principal‑level scope, or future people leadership if that’s the direction you want to go
- Define and improve the engineering architecture for Service and Marketing AI capabilities. Lead the design of scalable, low‑latency backend systems and APIs that power our AI products and agents for 183K+ customers, handling billions of events and interactions
- Build and harden AI serving systems. Lead the development of services that host and orchestrate AI models (LLMs, tools, evaluators, retrieval systems), with clear contracts, SLOs, and observability so other teams can depend on them
- Evolve our agentic architecture. Drive the technical roadmap for Service and Marketing AI agents—improving tool use, autonomy, and reliability so agents can safely take actions on behalf of customers and internal users with minimal human intervention
- Set engineering standards for AI services. Establish best practices for evaluation, safety/guardrails, prompt and model versioning, offline and online tests, and incident response for AI‑backed systems; hold the bar for design reviews and code quality
- Lead cross‑team technical work. Act as the primary technical interface between Service / Marketing AI and other product/platform teams—clarifying ownership boundaries, aligning on interfaces, and unblocking dependencies across hubs and time zones
- Mentor and uplevel engineers. Coach senior and mid‑level engineers through design, implementation, and operational best practices, helping them grow into stronger system owners and future tech leads
- Help build the Palo Alto hub. Shape local engineering rituals, help with hiring and onboarding, and create healthy patterns for cross‑hub collaboration so work and career opportunities are not constrained by geography
- Measure what matters. Define and track key metrics for your systems—availability, latency, cost‑to‑serve, agent success rates, eval scores, and customer adoption—and use those insights to drive roadmap and technical decisions
- Transform engineering and product development workflows by putting AI at the center, building & utilizing agentic coding tools and AI-first working
Our take
Klaviyo is a marketing firm helping growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing campaigns. From personalised newsletters to automated emails when customers abandon their shopping carts, the marketing automation platform makes it easy for businesses to capture, store, analyze, and predictively use their own data to drive measurable, high-value outcomes.
Klaviyo's CEO, Bialecki, believes that the main problem with e-mail marketing today is that there is a divide between two kinds of tools: analytics tools that help you understand what people are doing on a website, such as what products they are considering, and messaging tools that send them a marketing e-mail. Operating primarily within the retail and eCommerce industry, Klaviyo aims to solve this by offering a tool that brings together analytics and messaging. This allows companies to bring all of their first-party data into a single platform to get a deep understanding of their customers and then activate that data to deliver highly-targeted, personalised communications through email and SMS. In the process, Klaviyo's customers get a deep understanding of their consumers.
Klaviyo is a fast-growing company mainly due to its business model - the firm offers a concrete ROI for Klaviyo’s clients if the software persuades customers to make purchases by treating different types of customers differently. An IPO in 2023 has led to Klaviyo's release of Klaviyo AI, which empowers businesses to unlock revenue-driving opportunities and deliver exceptional customer experiences across channels. Still in its early days of public listing, it will be interesting to see how Klaviyo fares in the years to come.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Meet the team
Devin Bhatia, Customer Success Manager
Our mission
Create exceptional customer experiences by providing immediate and long-lasting value, while empowering creators to own their growth.Insights
Company
Employee endorsements
Opportunities to learn
"Not only we have a good stipend to spend on learning but we also have development days every quarter, where we can switch off and focus on the areas..."
Company benefits
- Private medical insurance
- Medical
- Dental
- Vision
- Lifestyle spending account
- Commuter benefits
- Modern Health - wellness platform
- Parental leave
- Company equity
- Employee stock purchase plan
- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
- Dental insurance
- Vision coverage through EyeMed
- Health savings account (HSA)
- Flexible spending accounts (FSAs)
- Employee assistance program (EAP)
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Flexible paid time off (FPTO)
- 13 company holidays
- Paid parental bonding leave
Company values
- Put customers first: We prioritize our customers > customers’ customers > team > ourselves. We empathize deeply with our customers by walking in their shoes and solving their greatest pain points. We start with what’s best for the customer, not what’s best for us, and work backwards, delivering experiences our customers will talk about.
- Win together: We’re one team, we get to know each other, we’re okay with conflict and willing to disagree and commit. We are honest, direct, transparent, and respectful. We seek and incorporate diverse perspectives and assume good intent.
- We’re 1% done: We’re just getting started – our greatest products, work, and achievements are in front of us. We have a beginner’s mindset – we see the opportunities to build and improve and have the ambition to go after them. We benchmark against the best, aim to beat them, and celebrate when we do.
- Know the score: We’re clear about what success is for each project and how it ladders to our overall success. Results are what matter. Working hard is required, but it’s not success. We use data and past performance to motivate our future strategy.
- Be meticulous in your craft: We seek to do work so good that people rave about it. We are rigorous, thorough and prepared. We are or expect to be the experts everyone in the world turns to.
- Move fast, no shortcuts: Speed matters. We set ambitious deadlines, we like short cycles and being first to market. We don’t skip critical steps or requirements to make a date. We’re comfortable living in the grey and making judgment calls to decide what’s required and what’s not.
- Drivers wanted: No passengers — we’re proactive and engaged, and if we see something wrong it’s our responsibility to fix it or raise the issue to its owner. Have a vision and make sure it’s compelling. No job is beneath us. If it needs to get done, we’re happy to pick it up. We use and spend resources like they’re our own.
- Stay hungry, stay humble: We are insatiably curious learners; our slopes are very high. If we don’t know something, we’re world- class at figuring it out. We take calculated risks and sometimes make mistakes — we’re not perfect. When we fail, we learn from it and improve going forward. Feedback is a gift, even if it hurts sometimes. We don’t tolerate brilliant jerks.
Company HQ
Boston, MA
Articles
Leadership
Andrew Bialecki
(CEO)Previously CTO at RockTech, Senior Engineer at Performable, Lead Engineer at Applied Predictive Technologies and an SDET Intern at Microsoft
Ed Hallen
(Chief Product Officer)Currently an Advisor at Team Engine. Previously worked in Enterprise Business Development at Google, Summer Associate at Accel-KKR and Principal at Applied Predictive Technologies.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 204 more jobs at Klaviyo