Staff Engineer, Applied AI for Scalable Customer Agents

Klaviyo Inc.; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 176,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

Klaviyo in Boston, MA is seeking a Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent) to own the technical and product direction for a core area of the Customer Agent platform. You’ll stay hands-on while shaping architecture, orchestration, governance, and reliability for production systems that scale with client demand.

This is a lead‑level, 0‑to‑1 initiative with startup speed and the backing of a high‑growth tech company.

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 owned your part of one through launch, incidents, and the operational reality after the demo.
• 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

Agent orchestration

Production systems

AI observability

LLM-powered workflows

Debugging production issues

Design reviews

Job description

Klaviyo in Boston, MA is seeking a Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent) to own the technical and product direction for a core area of the Customer Agent platform. You’ll stay hands-on while shaping architecture, orchestration, governance, and reliability for production systems that scale with client demand.

This is a lead‑level, 0‑to‑1 initiative with startup speed and the backing of a high‑growth tech company.