Principal Data Platform Engineer — AI-Driven Pipelines

The Briefed; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Klaviyo is seeking a Principal Data Platform Engineer to own the overall technical direction of its data platform, spanning streaming ingestion, batch compute, lakehouse storage, and governance. This IC role requires leading system design without direct reports and delivering fast, reliable, and cost-efficient data infrastructure.

You will mentor senior staff, drive paved roads for data producers and consumers, and collaborate across teams to ensure scalable, secure data access for analysts and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience building large-scale distributed data systems.
• Expertise across streaming and batch data stacks with multi-tenant reliability.
• Strong track record delivering data contracts, governance, and scalable platforms.

Responsibilities

• Core Data Platform Architecture: design and implement real-time ingestion, stream processing, and lakehouse storage.
• Define SLOs for data freshness, availability, and correctness; manage ADRs and post-incident reviews.
• Data Governance & Contracts: establish data contracts, schema governance, and reusable templates.
• Performance & FinOps: tune distributed compute for cost efficiency and reliability.
• AI-Augmented Data Ops: apply GenAI tools for semantic search, auto-docs, and AI-assisted quality checks.
• Mentorship: guide senior engineers through reviews and design doc oversight.

Skills

Kafka

Pub/Sub

Flink

Spark Streaming

Beam

ML/GenAI tooling

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Spark

Iceberg

Delta Lake

Snowflake

BigQuery

S3/GCS

CDC pipelines

Job description

Klaviyo is seeking a Principal Data Platform Engineer to own the overall technical direction of its data platform, spanning streaming ingestion, batch compute, lakehouse storage, and governance. This IC role requires leading system design without direct reports and delivering fast, reliable, and cost-efficient data infrastructure.

You will mentor senior staff, drive paved roads for data producers and consumers, and collaborate across teams to ensure scalable, secure data access for analysts and