Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI

About the role

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. This Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI role is focused on leading the team that is building Customer Agent, a conversational AI system that enables brands to interact with their customers at a scale they have never achieved before. You will be responsible for guiding the technical vision while ensuring that the system delivers real-time, contextually aware conversations that help brands support, convert, and retain millions of consumers. The role requires a leader who is passionate about defining the future of AI-powered customer engagement and is committed to shipping reliable features that are treated as a product feature, not an afterthought. You will have the opportunity to shape the direction of a critical product line and directly influence the quality and reliability of the AI experiences our customers depend on.

Key facts

What you'll do

Lead the design and implementation of the Customer Agent platform, defining the architecture for orchestration, evaluation, and guardrail systems that ensure safe and trustworthy autonomous agent behavior at scale.

Own the end-to-end delivery of the Customer Agent product, managing the team's mission, strategy, and roadmap while directly managing key workstreams to drive reliable execution against business goals.

Write and ship production-grade code when necessary to unblock critical technical challenges, review architecture decisions, and debug complex production issues that impact live customer traffic.

Partner closely with product, data science, and go-to-market teams to translate ambiguous customer problems into a clear technical roadmap, ensuring alignment between technical capabilities and business outcomes.

Build and grow a high-performing team of full-stack and AI engineers, overseeing hiring, leveling, performance reviews, and career development to create a strong, cohesive engineering culture.

Establish and maintain rigorous evaluation frameworks and quality gates that measure agent performance, reliability, and safety, using data to drive continuous improvement.

Provide both direction and direct feedback to engineers with empathy and curiosity, fostering an environment of growth, accountability, and continuous learning.

Own the reliability and scalability of the agent platform, making informed trade-offs between speed, quality, and stability to ensure a consistent experience for end users.

Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize workstreams, manage dependencies, and coordinate efforts across engineering teams to deliver complex initiatives on schedule.

Champion best practices in software engineering, including code review, testing, and documentation, to ensure the long-term maintainability and extensibility of the system.

Requirements

You have shipped a production agentic system that makes autonomous choices on live, customer-facing traffic and personally owned the hardest agent problems, including orchestration, evaluation frameworks as a quality gate, guardrails, and failure handling on non-deterministic output.

You bring 8+ years of experience in software engineering building software products and 4+ years of experience managing engineering teams, with clear communication across technical and business audiences.

You possess credibility that comes from the work itself; you are still hands-on enough to write and ship code, debug production issues, and make architecture calls yourself.

You genuinely enjoy developing people and building a team, viewing hiring, leveling, coaching, and giving direct feedback as a core part of the job you want to do.

You have a deep, practical mastery of engineering architectures required to build and maintain highly scalable systems in production.

You have a proven track record of leading and shipping complex, multi-quarter initiatives that require tight coordination across multiple engineering teams.

You are comfortable owning the hard problems in distributed systems, including debugging production issues and making critical decisions about reliability trade-offs.

You communicate with empathy, curiosity, and clarity, ensuring that your technical and strategic direction is understood and supported by both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

Experience with conversational AI, agent frameworks, and evaluation methodologies specific to autonomous systems.

A background in building customer-facing AI products and working closely with go-to-market teams to align product strategy.

Practical notes

This role is full-time, based in Boston, MA.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship for this position.

The compensation range provided reflects the base salary for this role in the specified location.