Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)

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.

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• Nice to Haves:
• Experience working on a multi-tenant agent platform at production scale, where external customers configure their own agent behavior on shared infrastructure.
• Experience building 0-to-1 products or working in startup environments.
• A track record with production evaluation systems, AI observability, or human-in-the-loop workflows for LLM-powered products.
• Boston, MA - In-Office Role
• Massachusetts Applicants:
• It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
• Our salary range reflects the cost of labor across various U.S. geographic markets. The range displayed below reflects the minimum and maximum target salaries for the position across all our US locations. The base salary offered for this position is determined by several factors, including the applicant’s job-related skills, relevant experience, education or training, and work location.
• In addition to base salary, our total compensation package may include participation in the company’s annual cash bonus plan, variable compensation (OTE) for sales and customer success roles, equity, sign-on payments, and a comprehensive range of health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits based on eligibility.
• Your recruiter can provide more details about the specific salary/OTE range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
• Base Pay Range For US Locations:
• $176,000 - $264,000 USD
• This role may require up to 10% travel for purposes such as new hire onboarding, client or partner work if applicable, team meetings, and industry events. Travel is coordinated in advance.
• Get to Know Klaviyo
• We’re Klaviyo (pronounced clay-vee-oh). We empower creators to own their destiny by making first-party data accessible and actionable like never before. We see limitless potential for the technology we’re developing to nurture personalized experiences in ecommerce and beyond. To reach our goals, we need our own crew of remarkable creators—ambitious and collaborative teammates who stay focused on our north star: delighting our customers. If you’re ready to do the best work of your career, where you’ll be welcomed as your whole self from day one and supported with generous benefits, we hope you’ll join us.
• AI fluency at Klaviyo includes responsible use of AI (including privacy, security, bias awareness, and human-in-the-loop). We provide accommodations as needed.
• Klaviyo is committed to a policy of equal opportunity and non-discrimination. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, citizenship, national origin, color, religion or religious creed, age, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, veteran or active military status, marital status, criminal record, genetics, retaliation, sexual harassment or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
• IMPORTANT NOTICE: Our company takes the security and privacy of job applicants very seriously. We will never ask for payment, bank details, or personal financial information as part of the application process. All our legitimate job postings can be found on our official career site. Please be cautious of job offers that come from non-company email addresses (@klaviyo.com), instant messaging platforms, or unsolicited calls.