Greenhouse ·
full-timeLead Engineer, Applied AI (customer Agent)
Klaviyo · Boston, MA
Klaviyo is a technology company focused on providing a marketing automation and data platform for brands. As a Lead Engineer for the Applied AI Customer Agent team, you will be responsible for building and scaling conversational AI systems designed to handle customer support at scale. This role involves moving beyond prototype development to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of agentic products, including orchestration, system governance, memory management, and failure handling for non-deterministic systems. You will work in an in-office environment, setting technical direction and architecture while remaining hands-on with coding and debugging. The position requires an engineer who has successfully taken agentic systems from initial design through production and into long-term operational maintenance. You will collaborate closely with product, design, and data science teams to define platform patterns and mentor other engineers through design reviews. This role is ideal for an experienced technical leader who thrives in ambiguous, high-growth environments and possesses deep practical experience in securing and stabilizing AI agents against real-world production traffic.
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. Lead Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent) About the Team: 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 Lead 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 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. What We're Looking For: 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 pos
| Role | Lead Engineer, Applied AI (customer Agent) |
|---|---|
| Company | Klaviyo |
| Location | Boston, MA |
| Type | full-time |
| Compensation | Not disclosed |
| Posted | 2026-10-08 |
| Deadline | Rolling |
Typical process for this type of role
A general guide — the exact steps for this specific listing may vary; check the original posting for details.
- 1ApplicationSubmit your resume through the apply link.
- 2ScreeningRecruiter reviews your background against the role.
- 3AssessmentA technical test, assignment, or coding round, depending on the role.
- 4Interview(s)One or more rounds with the hiring team.
- 5OfferOffer letter with compensation and start date.
Before you apply
0/4About Klaviyo
Klaviyo, Inc. is an AI-first B2C CRM platform founded in 2012 and headquartered in Boston. The company provides a unified solution that integrates marketing automation, customer service, analytics, and a data platform to help businesses manage customer relationships. By centralizing behavioral, transactional, and engagement data, Klaviyo enables brands to deliver personalized, omnichannel campaigns across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and mobile push notifications. The platform utilizes AI agents to automate marketing tasks, resolve customer service inquiries, and optimize campaign performance. Klaviyo currently serves over 205,000 brands across more than 100 countries, processing billions of events and managing billions of customer profiles daily to support business growth.
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