Senior Software Engineer, Asynchronous Processing

United States Digital Space LLC; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in Boston seeks a Senior Platform Engineer for the Asynchronous Processing team to architect, build, and operate large-scale, event-driven backbones on AWS/Kubernetes using Pulsar, Kafka, and SQS. You will own design, observability, on-call readiness, and mentor engineers, delivering self-service queueing platforms that scale to millions of messages per second.

Join a senior, autonomous team focused on delivering rock-solid infrastructure and high-availability

Qualifications

• BA/BS in CS or related field or equivalent experience.
• 6+ years of hands-on software development and operations at scale.
• Experience owning complex projects end-to-end including design, rollout, and maintenance.
• Strong communication and mentorship to junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and operate large-scale, event-driven backbone powering multiple products.
• Design and deliver software to improve availability, latency, and efficiency of async services.
• Develop self-service queueing and processing platforms for product teams.
• Collaborate across teams to uphold best practices and drive architectural improvements.
• Participate in on-call duties and drive incident RCAs and prevention measures.
• Mentor engineers to improve performance, reliability, and observability.

Skills

Senior dev experience

Mentorship

Communication

Education

BA/BS in CS or related field

Tools

Python

Go

Apache Pulsar

Kafka

SQS

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

*At the company, we value the unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives each the company (we call ourselves Klaviyos) brings to our workplace each and every day. We believe everyone deserves a fair shot at success and appreciate the experiences each person brings beyond the traditional job requirements. If you’re a close but not exact match with the description, we hope you’ll still consider applying. Want to learn more about life at the company? Visit the company.com/careersto see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.

Team Overview:

The mission of the Asynchronous Processing team is to design, build, and operate the company’s high-scale, event-driven backbone so that every product team can reliably move data through our systems with confidence, no matter the volume. By providing opinionated, self-service platforms for queueing and background processing–grounded in technologies like Golang, Python, Apache Pulsar, Kafka, SQS, AWS, and Kubernetes–we enable engineering teams to focus on customer impact while we ensure their workloads are fast, observable, cost-efficient, and resilient by default.

As a Senior Platform Engineer on the Asynchronous Processing team, you will architect, build, and operate the large-scale, event-driven backbone that powers the company, crafting paved-path primitives on top of Golang, Python, Apache Pulsar, Kafka, and SQS running in AWS and Kubernetes. You’ll design and evolve resilient, multi-tenant queueing and processing platforms that safely handle massive spikes in traffic, process millions of messages per second with low latency, and provide simple, self-service APIs and tooling that enable product teams to move fast and with confidence. From core data models and routing patterns to observability, autoscaling, and failure isolation, you’ll own systems that must be rock solid at scale, partnering closely with engineers across the company to turn complex distributed-systems problems into intuitive, reliable building blocks.

This role is for senior engineers who love taming large-scale distributed systems and turning real-world asynchronous workloads into reliable, scalable platforms. You’ll work on highly visible infrastructure at the heart of the company’s event-driven backbone, directly shaping how thousands of Klaviyos build, ship, and operate products every day.

How You’ll Make an Impact:

The Asynchronous Processing team builds and operates the company’s high-scale, event-driven backbone that powers reliable, low-latency async workloads for every product team. As a Senior Platform Engineer on the Asynchronous Processing team, you will:

• Build a deep understanding of engineering needs across the organization, guiding the design and development of appropriate platform primitives in queueing that align with the platform's vision and practically empower product teams.
• Design, develop, and deliver software to dramatically improve the availability, scalability, latency, and efficiency of the company's asynchronous and queueing services.
• Design and develop systems and processes that enable highly available & scalable systems, with a focus on asynchronous processing.
• Leverage technology such as Python, Golang, AWS, and Kubernetes to advance the company's platform, with a deep focus on Apache Pulsar, SQS, and Kafka.
• Champion best practices by actively collaborating with other teams in a culture that values technical design review.
• Mentor and pair with other the company engineers to build better software by focusing on performance, self-healing systems, configuration as code, and defensive programming.
• Participate in periodic on-call duties with a focus on solving issues when they are discovered, preventing recurrences and minimizing alert fatigue.

Who You Are:

• You are passionate about building software effectively and for the long term, balancing technical quality, velocity, and business impact.
• BA or BS Degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent experience.
• You typically bring 6+ years of hands-on software development experience building and operating highly available, full-stack SaaS products at scale, or have demonstrated equivalent proficiency and impact.
• You are independently responsible for the full lifecycle of complex projects or features, including discovery, technical design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing maintenance. You provide clear technical direction for others involved.
• You own the operational health of the systems you build, including performance, reliability, and observability. You are comfortable defining and upholding SLOs, participating in on-call, and driving follow-through on incidents and RCAs.
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), and containerized environments (Kubernetes), including how to design services that run reliably at scale in those environments.
• Expertise and hands-on experience with asynchronous processing and queueing systems like SQS, Kafka, or Apache Pulsar.
• Ability to handle yourself and complex systems in outage situations and to drive failures to root cause analysis and prevention of future issues.
• You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects, and you’re excited to dive in and learn fast. You’re hungry to responsibly explore new AI tools and workflows, finding ways to make your work smarter and more efficient.
• You question convention and proactively look for ways to improve, whether that’s workflows, architecture, tooling, or team processes. You are intrinsically motivated to drive incremental and step-change improvements that deliver value to the business.
• You are an excellent communicator and collaborator. You lead technical discussions at the project and product-area level, write clear technical design documents and RFCs, and keep stakeholders aligned on progress, risks, and trade-offs.
• You mentor and support other engineers, offering thoughtful feedback in design and code reviews, helping refine specifications, and investing in the growth of more junior engineers on the team.
• You enjoy working on small, autonomous, agile teams, shipping early and often, pairing with product managers, business stakeholders, and other engineers to craft better software.

Nice to Have:

• Fundamental understanding of Linux and all layers of the networking stack; you should be confident administering and debugging production Linux systems.
• Practical experience building high availability systems at scale with Apache Pulsar.

Technologies We Use:

the company’s platform is primarily built with Python and React and runs on AWS. Engineers join us from a wide range of technical backgrounds and are supported in learning our stack. Core technologies include:

• Python / Django / FastAPI / GoLang
• Protobuf
• Apache Pulsar / Apache Kafka / SQS
• AWS / Terraform / Kubernetes / Argo / Istio / Kong

Location & Work Model:

This role is based in Boston, Massachusetts. the company supports work authorization and relocation for this position.

At the company, we enjoy tackling meaningful engineering challenges and value people who take ownership, learn continuousl