Director of Engineering, AI

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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.

Klaviyo’s mission is to help businesses own their growth. AI is at the center of that mission — and we’re building the engineering organization to match. As Director, Engineering – AI, you’ll lead the teams turning our AI strategy into real, daily leverage for hundreds of thousands of customers: from the underlying AI platform and agent framework to the product experiences embedded throughout Klaviyo.

You’ll own the technical vision and execution strategy for AI-powered capabilities across Klaviyo’s product surface, partnering deeply with Product, Design, ML, Data Science, and GTM to define what to build, ship it quickly and safely, and measure real impact in customer outcomes — not just model demos. This is a hands-on, execution-first role for a product-minded engineering leader who is fluent in modern LLMs, agent patterns, and what it takes to bring AI capabilities to production at scale.

How You’ll Make a Difference

• Own the AI engineering charter. Define the technical vision and roadmap for AI-powered capabilities on Klaviyo’s platform, and translate it into clear plans, OKRs, and milestones for your teams.
• Design and evolve the AI platform. Lead the architecture for LLM-powered and agentic systems — orchestration, tool/function calling, retrieval and memory, evaluation harnesses, observability, and safety guardrails tuned for real-world product workflows.
• Ship remarkable, AI-native product experiences. Partner with Product, Design, and partner engineering teams to prioritize the highest-value use cases, break them into shippable iterations, and launch experiences that feel intuitive and powerful — not just demos bolted onto existing UI.
• Make safety, reliability, and measurability non-negotiable. Define success metrics and guardrails for AI systems (e.g., time-to-first-value, uplift over baselines, override rates, hallucination/error rates, latency, SLOs), and build the tooling to monitor and continuously improve them in production.
• Integrate deeply with Klaviyo’s data and platform stack. Collaborate with Data Platform, Production Infrastructure, and product engineering teams to ensure AI systems can safely and efficiently access the right data while respecting privacy, security, and governance constraints.
• Raise the bar on AI engineering craft. Build shared patterns, libraries, and best practices for prompt and chain design, evaluation, human-in-the-loop review, and observability that other teams can reuse; champion rigorous experimentation, A/B testing, and fast feedback loops.
• Lead high-performing engineering teams (ICs and managers). Hire, develop, and retain high-performing, inclusive teams; set crisp expectations, coach for impact, and create a culture of urgency, accountability, and psychological safety.
• Partner across Klaviyo to land changes. Work closely with GTM, Support, and Customer Success to roll out new AI capabilities safely, enable the field, and close the loop between customer feedback, product decisions, and system improvements.
• Measure what matters. Own a clear scorecard for your area — adoption, activation, uplift vs. baselines, quality/satisfaction, AI system reliability, and developer velocity — and use it to drive prioritization and investment decisions.
• Transform workflows by putting AI at the center, building smarter systems and ways of working from the ground up, and continuously experimenting with AI tools — testing, learning, and sharing insights to keep Klaviyo ahead of the curve.

Who You Are

• An experienced, product-minded engineering leader. ~10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years leading multiple teams and managers building user-facing products in high-growth SaaS or similar environments. You’re energized by building things customers love, not just infrastructure for its own sake.
• Hands-on with modern AI and agentic systems. You’ve led teams building with LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, or agent frameworks — designing multi-step flows, tool calling, memory, evaluation, and safety guardrails — even if you’re not coding every day.
• A deep systems and product thinker. You can dive into architecture and data flows, but also reason from first principles about customer workflows, jobs-to-be-done, and where AI can produce step-change improvements vs. incremental shortcuts.
• An outcome-oriented operator. You define clear success metrics and hold teams accountable to them; you’re comfortable saying “no,” narrowing scope, and iterating fast.
• A builder of high-performing, inclusive teams. You’ve hired and developed diverse engineering teams, grown new leaders, and created cultures where people do the best work of their careers while feeling respected and included.
• An exceptional collaborator and communicator. You translate complex AI/ML and systems topics into clear narratives for non-technical partners; you influence peers and executives, drive alignment across Product, Engineering, Data, and GTM, and model Klaviyo’s values in how you work.
• Adaptable and resilient. You stay close to the work, dive deep when needed, and lead your teams through ambiguity and change with clarity and calm.
• A practitioner of AI-first ways of working. You know how to lead your whole team to use AI in day-to-day engineering development cycles, and you’ve experimented with or practiced fully agentic coding workflows.
• You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects, and you’re excited to dive in and learn fast. You’re hungry to responsibly explore new AI tools and workflows, finding ways to make your work smarter and more efficient.

Nice to Haves

• Experience building AI-powered products for end users in complex SaaS workflows (e.g., martech, CRM, growth tooling, developer platforms).
• Prior work on agentic or copilot-style experiences embedded in production products at scale.
• Background combining experimentation platforms, offline evaluation, and human review loops to improve AI systems over time.
• Experience operating in multi-product, multi-team environments where clear interfaces and ownership boundaries are critical.
• Comfort working from our Boston hub with distributed teams across time zones.

Why This Role Matters

AI will reshape how businesses plan, execute, and optimize across every workflow — and Klaviyo is investing to make those capabilities real, safe, and accessible to every customer, not just the most technical ones. As Director, Engineering – AI, you’ll define and deliver the next generation of AI-native experiences in our core product, shaping both how our customers work and how our teams build. You’ll help ensure Klaviyo stays ahead in AI while staying true to our values: putting customers first, moving fast without shortcuts, and staying hungry and humble as we scale.

We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process. For jobs or candidates in NYC, certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 3, 2025.

Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here

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:

$244,000—$366,000 USD

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.

By participating in Klaviyo’s interview process, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and will adhere to our Guidelines for using AI in the Klaviyo interview Process. For more information about how we process your personal data, see our Job Applicant Privacy Notice.

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.

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