Overview As Senior Staff Engineer, you will shape and scale Customer Agent, Klaviyo's AI-driven conversational platform, enabling real-time, context-aware customer interactions at scale. You will define technical strategy, architect the system, and mentor engineers while partnering with product, design, and data science to deliver impactful AI experiences. This role blends hands-on coding with strategic leadership, operating across multiple teams to advance reliable, extensible AI solutions. You will work at the intersection of large-scale systems, agent workflows, personalization, and real-world customer outcomes, driving meaningful value for brands.
Compensation / Benefits- health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits
- equity
- sign-on payments
- annual bonus plan
- comprehensive compensation package
Responsibilities- Lead architecture, design, and implementation of the core platform and AI capabilities for Customer Agent
- Steer long-term system evolution and technical strategy for conversational experiences
- Build and ship complex AI-powered product features balancing speed, quality, reliability, and customer impact
- Collaborate with Product, Design, Data Science, GTM, and Engineering to align product direction
- Make critical technical decisions around architectures, orchestration, retrieval, memory, tools, evaluation, and reliability
- Establish engineering practices around observability, testing, monitoring, and operational excellence for AI systems
- Lead large cross-functional initiatives across teams and organizations
- Mentor engineers through technical leadership, reviews, architecture discussions, and hands-on collaboration
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies and frameworks to create customer value
- Influence engineering standards and broader AI platform direction
Key requirements- 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale
- Experience shipping customer-facing AI-powered products or agentic systems
- Strong backend and distributed systems fundamentals with focus on scale, latency, reliability, and tradeoffs
- Expertise with modern AI architectures (LLM-powered apps, retrieval, agent workflows, orchestration, evaluation frameworks, guardrails)
- Proven ability to lead complex multi-quarter initiatives across teams
- Strong product instincts linking technical decisions to customer/business outcomes
- Comfort in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and setting direction
- Excellent communication and collaboration across engineering, product, design, and executives
- Hands-on builder who codes and tackles hard technical problems
- Track record of influencing engineering organizations through leadership, mentorship, and execution
- excellent communication
- collaboration across cross-functional teams
- mentorship and technical leadership
- LLM-powered architectures
- retrieval systems
- agent workflows
