Sr. Lead - AI Engineer

Build the Core Orchestration platform that powers Marketing AI and Service AI agentic capabilities at Klaviyo’s Boston hub. This role combines platform engineering with AI-native development practices, with an emphasis on high-throughput, low-latency, and extreme reliability in customer interactions. You’ll lead technical direction, help set standards across engineering teams, and collaborate closely with product, data science, design, and executive leaders to shape long-term platform architecture.

Location: Boston, MA (onsite, hub-first model with regular in-office collaboration).
Compensation: USD 216,000 - 324,000 per year.
Experience: 8+ years.

What you’ll do

• Architect and scale Klaviyo’s Core Orchestration platform to support high-traffic, low-latency services with extreme reliability.
• Set the technical vision for integrating AI-driven agentic workflows and automated decision-making into core customer interactions.
• Drive adoption of AI-native software development practices to improve engineering productivity and delivery speed.
• Design foundational frameworks and services used across engineering teams, and raise technical standards through design reviews and mentorship.
• Partner with product management, data science, design, and executive leaders to influence strategic roadmaps and long-term platform architecture.

What you bring

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience focused on distributed systems, microservices architecture, and owning high-availability backend platforms.
• Hands-on experience shipping production LLM workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, or agentic frameworks, including strong understanding of evals, prompt architecture, and fine-tuning.
• Proven experience architecting event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing pipelines, and message queues for heavy throughput (e.g., Kafka, Celery, SQS, Redis).
• Deep proficiency in Python and modern frameworks (FastAPI, Django), plus experience with data processing platforms and object-relational mapping tools.
• Strong expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD automation, and modern observability suites, integrating cloud architecture into system design.
• Experience building automated evaluation frameworks for AI models, balancing latency, accuracy, cost, and safety in production.
• Technical leadership that improves team performance through architectural direction, collaborative problem-solving, and clear communication across engineering and business domains.
• Ability to collaborate directly with PMs, ML engineers, and customers, translating customer needs into product goals and technical constraints while prioritizing customer experience.
• Active use of AI coding tools and modern agentic development workflows to accelerate innovation and shorten feedback cycles.
• Strong outcomes orientation, turning complex customer needs into resilient software architecture.

Nice to have

• Experience designing or integrating shared AI/ML platforms used by multiple internal engineering teams.
• Domain expertise in MarTech, e-commerce platforms, personalization engines, or real-time event streaming.

Travel

This role may require up to 10% travel for new hire onboarding, client or partner work (if applicable), team meetings, and industry events.

Technologies

Python, FastAPI, Django, Kafka, Celery, SQS, Redis, AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, LLM, RAG, message queues, observability suites