Director of Engineering, Klaviyo
Messaging Infrastructure
$244-366k
Salary is applicable to US rates only and may vary on further locations
3+ days a week in office
The autonomous B2C CRM
Open for applications
The autonomous B2C CRM
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$244-366k
Salary is applicable to US rates only and may vary on further locations
3+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
Klaviyo is the only autonomous 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
- Platform-minded leader with a track record building/operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems (messaging, streaming, or analogous high-throughput platforms). You’re hands-on enough to dig into architecture, but you lead through clarity, metrics, and great managers
- Owner of outcomes. You connect engineering choices to business results—deliverability, latency, reliability, developer velocity, and cost—and hold teams accountable for moving those numbers
- High-intensity, high-urgency operator who thrives in ambiguity, makes crisp tradeoffs, and ships ambitious, reliable systems on a predictable cadence
- Inclusive people leader experienced in growing managers and senior ICs, building healthy on-call cultures, and scaling organizations across hubs
- Strong partner & communicator who can translate complex systems into simple narratives for executives, customers, and cross-functional peers
- AI-fluent builder. You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are excited to learn fast and responsibly integrate AI into everyday workflows
- We value candidates who are rigorous, curious, and driven to create leverage for every Klaviyo developer and customer
- We believe everyone deserves a fair shot at success and appreciate the experiences each person brings beyond the traditional job requirements. If you’re a close but not exact match with the description, we hope you’ll still consider applying
Desirable
- Domain experience with email MTAs, SMS aggregators/carrier networks, push services, or deliverability tooling
- Prior leadership of multi-region or hybrid-cloud systems, and experience setting SLOs/error budgets at platform boundaries
- Background in privacy-aware systems (e.g., consent orchestration, data residency, data retention/TTL strategies)
- Experience improving developer experience (APIs/SDKs, golden paths, internal platforms) for 10+ product teams
What the job involves
- As Director of Engineering, Messaging Infrastructure, you will lead the teams that build and operate the core, multi-tenant platform that sends and receives messages at massive scale across email, SMS, mobile push, WhatsApp, and future channels
- Your organization will own the services, pipelines, and integrations that ensure messages are delivered fast, reliably, and compliantly—so product teams can innovate confidently and our customers can trust us with their most valuable communications
- Success in this role means higher deliverability, lower latency and cost-per-message, stronger privacy & compliance posture, and faster developer velocity across Klaviyo
- Own the messaging platform end to end (ingestion, orchestration, templating/rendering, scheduling, routing, send, feedback loops, analytics)—with clear SLOs, scalable multi-region architecture, and a measurable reliability posture (e.g., error budgets, MTTR, incident rate)
- Increase deliverability & throughput by advancing our MTA/SMS provider strategies, queueing and rate-limiting, channel-specific features (e.g., pre-flight checks, warm-up), and feedback processing (bounces, complaints, carrier responses)
- Harden compliance & safety in partnership with Legal/Privacy (e.g., consent/state management, opt-out, quiet hours, TCPA/CAN‑SPAM/CTIA/GDPR-aware workflows) to protect customers and their end-users
- Accelerate developer velocity for channel teams via clear APIs, SDKs, contracts, documentation, and paved-road tooling (test environments, canaries, shadow traffic, feature flags, progressive delivery)
- Deliver business impact by tying platform choices to measurable outcomes (deliverability %, send latency, success rate, $/MM, cycle time), setting an annual platform strategy and quarterly commitments
- Build and scale a high-performing org of managers and senior ICs; raise the talent bar through crisp expectations, transparent feedback, and career growth paths aligned to Klaviyo’s standards
- Transform workflows with AI. Put AI at the center of how the org plans, operates, and learns—using it to streamline incident response, speed root-cause analysis, optimize capacity, and improve developer productivity
- Set vision & roadmap: Define a 12–18 month technical strategy for Messaging Infrastructure; translate it into quarterly, outcomes-based plans with clear tradeoffs and risks
- Architect for scale & resiliency: Guide design for high-throughput streaming, durable queues, idempotent processing, multi-tenant isolation, and multi-region failover; champion observability-first development
- Operational excellence: Establish SLOs and on-call practices; lead major incident reviews with a blameless, action-oriented posture; drive cost efficiency and capacity planning
- Partner deeply: Work with Product, Security, Data, and GTM teams to align on customer requirements, roadmaps, and launch readiness; represent the platform in exec forums
- Elevate engineering quality: Institutionalize design reviews, threat modeling, test strategies, and change management that reduce cycle time while protecting reliability
- Talent & culture: Hire exceptional people, develop managers, and model urgency, ownership, and accountability—rewarding impact and raising the bar on what “good” looks like at scale
- Continuously experiment with AI—testing tools, sharing learning, and championing new applications that responsibly accelerate org workflows and elevate quality
- Hub-based, hybrid collaboration; on-call coverage appropriate to mission-critical systems
Application process
- Interview process emphasizes technical depth, leadership behaviors (ownership, urgency, accountability), and measurable impact
Our take
Klaviyo is a SaaS autonomous B2C CRM 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, analyse, 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
4% employee growth in 12 months
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
- Mental health benefits
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
Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Articles
Leadership
Andrew Bialecki
(Co-Founder & Co-CEO)Previously CTO at RockTech, Senior Engineer at Performable, Lead Engineer at Applied Predictive Technologies and an SDET Intern at Microsoft
Ed Hallen
(Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer)Previously worked in Enterprise Business Development at Google, Summer Associate at Accel-KKR and Principal at Applied Predictive Technologies.
Chano Fernandez
(Co-CEO)Chano serves as the co-CEO, leading all go-to-market functions at Klaviyo. He previously led organizations at SAP, Workday, and Eightfold.
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