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Salary: USD 176,000 - 264,000 / annual
Klaviyo is seeking a Lead Engineer for Applied AI to set technical and product direction for their Customer Agent platform—a conversational AI system enabling brands to serve customers at scale. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll own a core area of the agentic product end-to-end, from orchestration to governance, while staying deeply involved in solving the hardest technical problems.
You will set technical and product direction for your area, taking on complex challenges including orchestration, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, memory and context management, and failure handling for non-deterministic systems. You'll write and ship code, review designs, make architectural decisions when answers aren't obvious, and define patterns that other engineers adopt. Rather than direct management, you'll mentor through design reviews and partner with product, design, data science, and go-to-market leaders to shape what gets built. You'll also evaluate emerging AI technologies and bring promising ones into production.
The Customer Agent team is based in Boston and works in-office. The team is past the demo stage, shipping changes against live customer traffic, measuring quality with real evaluation frameworks, and treating reliability as a product feature. One engineer's work visibly shapes how the platform evolves.
Klaviyo is a high-growth company on the East Coast that empowers creators through first-party data accessibility and actionable insights. The company values ambitious, collaborative teammates focused on delighting customers.
REQUIREMENTS:
- You have built, scaled, and supported production agentic systems (not just prototypes): real orchestration, evaluation systems, guardrails, and non-deterministic failure handling. You've owned your part through launch, incidents, and post-demo operational reality.
- You've learned hard lessons from running agents in production: securing them against misuse and abuse, and maintaining reliability as a non-deterministic system scales.
- You've owned technical and product direction for a significant area before (not just your own component), and can point to something you designed and championed that shipped and that other engineers built upon.
- You're hands-on: writing code, reviewing architecture decisions, and debugging production issues yourself—not delegating the hardest problems.
- Your patterns and designs are reused by other engineers; you've unblocked many others' projects, not just your own.
- You communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly across engineering and product audiences and can turn undefined problems into plans others rally behind.
NICE TO HAVES:
- Experience with multi-tenant agent platforms at production scale where external customers configure agent behavior on shared infrastructure.
- Experience building 0-to-1 products or working in startup environments.
- Track record with production evaluation systems, AI observability, or human-in-the-loop workflows for LLM-powered products.
