Staff AI Engineer, Customer-Agent Systems

Klaviyo Inc.; Boston, Northern (MA, KY); Hybrid; USD 176,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Klaviyo is seeking a Staff Engineer for Applied AI (Customer Agent) in Boston. You will set technical and product direction for a core area, owning a 0‑to‑1 agentic product with startup speed and big‑company resources.

You’ll work hands‑on across orchestration, evaluation, and governance to shape the platform’s evolution. You’ll lead in a multi‑tenant environment, tackle non‑deterministic challenges, and drive reliable production systems while mentoring peers and collaborating with product, data

Qualifications

• You’ve built, scaled, and supported production agentic systems, not just prototyped them: 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 owned technical and product direction for a significant area before, not just your own component, and you can point to something you designed and championed that shipped and that other engineers built on.
• You’re hands‑on: writing code, reviewing your own and others’ architecture decisions, and debugging production issues yourself, not delegating the hardest problems away.
• Your patterns and designs are reused by other engineers, and you’ve unblocked many others’ projects, not just your own.
• You communicate complex technical trade‑offs clearly across engineering and product audiences, and you can turn an undefined problem into a plan others rally behind.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical and product direction for a core area of Customer Agent, from architecture through production, and contribute to the direction of the platform overall.
• Take on the hardest technical problems in your area: orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, memory & context, failure handling for non‑deterministic systems.
• Write and ship code, review designs, and make the hard calls in your area when there’s no obvious right answer.
• Define patterns that other engineers adopt, and mentor through design reviews rather than direct management.
• Partner with product, design, data science, and go‑to‑market leaders to shape what gets built, not just how it’s built.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and bring the ones worth betting on into production.

Skills

Production agentic systems

Orchestration

Evaluation

Guardrails

Non-deterministic failure handling

Hands-on coding

Job description

Klaviyo is seeking a Staff Engineer for Applied AI (Customer Agent) in Boston. You will set technical and product direction for a core area, owning a 0‑to‑1 agentic product with startup speed and big‑company resources.

You’ll work hands‑on across orchestration, evaluation, and governance to shape the platform’s evolution. You’ll lead in a multi‑tenant environment, tackle non‑deterministic challenges, and drive reliable production systems while mentoring peers and collaborating with product, data