Senior Lead Engineer, AI Agents — Build Production Systems

Klaviyo; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 216,000 - 324,000; Full time

Job summary

Klaviyo is hiring a Senior Lead Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent) for an in‑office role based in Boston, MA. You will set the technical and product direction for the Customer Agent platform, building a scalable agentic system with ownership and speed characteristic of a startup, while remaining hands‑on with the hardest problems.

You will collaborate with product, design, data science, and GTM teams to shape the roadmap, evaluate new AI technologies, and ship production‑level solutions that

Qualifications

• You've architected, built, scaled, and supported a production agentic system end to end, not just prototyped one: real orchestration, evals, guardrails, and non‑deterministic failure handling.
• You've learned the hard lessons that only come from running agents in production: securing them against misuse and abuse, and the operational scar tissue of keeping a non‑deterministic system reliable as usage grows.
• You've set technical and product direction for an entire product area before, not just your own component, and you can point to something you designed and championed that shipped and that other teams built on.
• You've stayed hands‑on through all of it: still writing code, reviewing your own architecture decisions, and debugging production issues yourself, not delegating the hardest problems away.
• Your past architecture and frameworks got reused by other teams, and you've unblocked multiple teams at once, not just your own.
• You communicate complex technical trade‑offs clearly across engineering, product, and executive audiences, and you can turn an undefined problem into a plan others rally behind.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical and product direction for Customer Agent's core platform, from architecture through production.
• Take on the platform's hardest technical problems personally: orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, memory & context, self‑healing/improving and failure handling for non‑deterministic systems.
• Write and ship code, review designs, and make the calls other engineers can't make alone.
• Build architecture and frameworks that other engineers and teams adopt, and mentor through design reviews rather than direct management.
• Partner with product, design, data science, and go‑to‑market leaders to shape the roadmap, not just execute against it.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and bring the ones worth betting on into production.

Skills

Agentic system

End-to-end

Non-deterministic systems

Code writing

Architecture decisions

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Klaviyo is hiring a Senior Lead Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent) for an in‑office role based in Boston, MA. You will set the technical and product direction for the Customer Agent platform, building a scalable agentic system with ownership and speed characteristic of a startup, while remaining hands‑on with the hardest problems.

You will collaborate with product, design, data science, and GTM teams to shape the roadmap, evaluate new AI technologies, and ship production‑level solutions that