Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)

Klaviyo; Boston, Northern (MA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Klaviyo is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Applied AI – Customer Agent area, based in Boston. You will lead end-to-end technical and product direction, stay hands-on, and drive production-grade AI systems that scale with customer needs.

In this role, you will own complex, ambiguous problems, work across orchestration to governance, and mentor teammates while shipping real-world AI capabilities in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical and product direction for a core area of Customer Agent, from architecture through production.
• Tackle hardest technical problems in orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, memory & context, and non-deterministic failures.
• Write and ship code, review designs, and make hard calls when there’s no obvious right answer.
• Define patterns that other engineers adopt and mentor through design reviews.
• Partner with product, design, data science, and go-to-market leaders to shape what gets built.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and bring the best into production.

Job description

At Klaviyo, we value the unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives each Klaviyo (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 Klaviyo? Visit klaviyo.com/careers to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.

Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)

About the Team:

Our Engineering team builds the AI systems that power how brands run their businesses on Klaviyo. We move fast, ship in production, and hold a high bar for what "AI-native" actually means: systems that make real judgment calls, not demos.

The Customer Agent team is one of the newest and most ambitious groups in that org, based in Boston and working in-office: we're building a conversational AI system that lets brands serve their own customers at a scale no human support team could match. We're still small enough that one engineer’s work visibly shapes how the whole platform evolves. We're past the demo stage: the team ships changes against live customer traffic, measures quality with real evaluation frameworks, and treats reliability as a product feature, not an afterthought.

About the Role:

As a Staff Engineer, you'll set the technical and product direction for a core area of Customer Agent end to end, building a 0-to-1 agentic product with the speed and ownership of a startup, backed by the scale and resources of one of the most innovative tech companies on the East Coast, while staying hands-on with the hardest problems yourself. This is a lead-level role, with a wide footprint across our agentic product - from orchestration to governance - that grows based on where the product is when you join. We're looking for an engineer who owns complex, ambiguous problems, who has built, scaled, and supported a production agentic system through everything that comes after the demo, and who up-levels the people, process, and technology around them.

How You'll Make an Impact:

• 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.