Sr. Lead - AI Engineer

Sr. Lead AI Engineer role at Klaviyo in Boston, focused on scaling the Core Orchestration platform for Marketing AI and Service AI agentic capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Architect and scale Klaviyo’s Core Orchestration platform for high-throughput, low-latency services with extreme reliability.
• Set and drive the technical direction for integrating AI-driven agentic workflows and automated decision-making into core customer interactions.
• Lead adoption of AI-native software development practices to improve engineering productivity and delivery speed.
• Design reusable foundation frameworks and services used across engineering teams.
• Maintain high technical standards through design reviews and mentorship.
• Collaborate with product management, data science, design, and executive leaders to shape strategic roadmaps and long-term platform architecture.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience in distributed systems, microservices architecture, and owning high-availability backend platforms.
• Hands-on experience shipping production LLM workflows, RAG pipelines, or agentic frameworks, including strong understanding of evals, prompt architecture, and fine-tuning.
• Demonstrated experience designing event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing pipelines, and message queues such as Kafka, Celery, SQS, and Redis for heavy throughput workloads.
• Strong proficiency in Python and modern frameworks including FastAPI and Django, plus experience with data processing platforms and ORM tooling.
• Deep expertise with AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD automation, and modern observability suites integrated into system design.
• Experience building automated evaluation frameworks for AI models, with tradeoffs across latency, accuracy, cost, and safety in production.
• Technical leadership that improves team performance through architectural direction, collaborative problem-solving, and clear communication across engineering and business domains.
• Comfort collaborating with PMs, ML engineers, and customers to translate customer needs, product goals, and technical constraints while prioritizing customer experience.
• Active use of AI coding tools and modern agentic development workflows to accelerate innovation and shorten feedback cycles.
• Focus on user outcomes with a strong ability to convert complex requirements into resilient software architecture.

Technologies

• Python, FastAPI, Django
• Kafka, Celery, SQS, Redis
• AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD automation, observability suites
• LLM, RAG, message queues

Nice to Have

• Experience designing or integrating shared AI/ML platforms used by multiple internal engineering teams.
• Domain experience in MarTech, e-commerce platforms, personalization engines, or real-time event streaming.

Travel Requirements

• May require up to 10% travel for new hire onboarding, client or partner work (if applicable), team meetings, and industry events.

Location

• Boston, MA (onsite)
• Based in the Boston hub with a hub-first model and regular in-office collaboration

Salary range: USD 216,000 - 324,000 per year