What It's Like Working at Klaviyo

Interviewer: Why should someone join Klaviyo?

Ankan Saha, Principal Staff Machine Learning Engineer: Klaviyo is at that stage right now where we have access to giant amounts of data from our customers and that is a very unique kind of data that is accessible only to Klaviyo. We are also getting to the stage where we are building out personalization models, agents, and other AI tools that can reap value from this data and produce features that are more efficient and more useful and data-driven for our customers.

If you are a professional who is planning to work with diverse amounts of very large scales of data, if you are interested in playing around with a lot of different kinds of AI tools that are top of the line, if you want to work on different kinds of agents in the marketing space, as well as build out personalization models, work on large-scale engineering while holding and maintaining large amounts of data, Klaviyo is probably the best place to join right now.

Interviewer: How quickly has Klaviyo embraced and adopted AI?

Ankan Saha: Klaviyo has been aggressively expanding several different AI tools that we have access to and are iterating upon. Because of the aggressive levels of adoption, we anticipate that we should be pretty mature in terms of the general usage of these tools, adoption of these tools, as well as their usage in experimentation purposes, within the next six to 12 months.

With Klaviyo, one of the good things has been that because AI has become so important and adoption has become so crucial, we have jumped in heads first, and we are trying to make sure that all employees across the board are finding value and are getting more used to using different kinds of tools that should be relevant to their individual work. So, I feel like we are taking a giant step forward, whereas many of the big players are at different stages of adoption.

Interviewer: What’s an exciting project you’re working on?

Ankan Saha: Since I joined, I have been working on the problem of audience optimization at Klaviyo, which is essentially giving the tools to our customers to figure out which audiences, or rather, subscribers, that they have, and how they want to engage with them in a smart data-driven fashion.

The plan for all of these data-driven methods is that we would want to minimize the total number of emails and SMSs sent while trying to ensure that the engagement from the subscribers does not go down by any noticeable amount. As a result, what should end up happening is that we do not send too many emails and SMSs to people who would probably unsubscribe from the emails by getting annoyed and rather focus on the subscribers who would be interested in getting these emails and clicking on them and going to the website and looking at the various different product catalogs that are available over there.

So the entire work of audience optimization is to hone in on specific parts of the audience so that we are able to gain the maximum engagement from all the communications that are being sent out.

 

 

Interviewer: How is Klaviyo leveraging AI in your day to day work?

Ankan Saha: At Klaviyo, we have various different AI tools that are available to all employees to use, try out, and figure out what makes them more efficient. On the one hand, we have coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code, which engineers can use to ask questions while they are coding, as well as use it to reframe the entire code base that they’re working on.

On the other hand, we have tools like Glean and Atlassian Rovo to search the entire documentation that we have at Klaviyo efficiently for finding answers to any questions that the employees might have. And finally, we have tools like OpenAI and Claude accessible to all employees so that the employees can use these to ask arbitrary questions that come up during day-to-day work and solve those tasks much more efficiently than before.

 

Interviewer: Why does Klaviyo’s mission matter?

Drew Kull, Sr. Director of Product Management: Klaviyo’s mission is to empower creators to own their own destiny. Why this matters to me is because in a world of emerging AI technology, I believe that companies can do more with less. And therefore, you’re gonna have smaller companies and that moat to start a new company becomes much easier to get across. I believe Klaviyo is well-positioned with our current customer base as well as the newcomers coming on to offer the tools necessary for them to grow their business by doing more with a lot less. And Klaviyo has the technology and the data for customers to enable that.

 

 

Interviewer: How would you describe Klaviyo’s culture?

Drew Kull: Klaviyo’s culture is awesome. It starts with being mission-driven. So, we’re really focused on that customer and the problem that they need solved and building technology to help solve that for them.

Klaviyo does a really good job of being fast-paced while focused on that mission. This culture isn’t fast-paced just to be churning and getting things out the door. It’s really focused on the mission and how quickly we can get there and get learnings out the door and hear back from our customers and start that iteration loop.

The final thing internally that I love about Klaviyos is that we’re just a bunch of collaborators. We are really focused on that mission and are willing to work together to help really drive towards the solutions that we wanna build. There’s no, "that’s not my job" or "you gotta do this on your own." It’s really a collaborative effort to get things done.

Interviewer: How is Klaviyo leveraging AI in your day to day work?

Drew Kull: At Klaviyo, we’re doing the typical chat agent work where we’re helping write documents, we’re summarizing meetings that we have with notes, we’re doing customer research and research about the products we want to build.

But where I sit in R&D, we also have the unique advantage of being able to use tools like N8N or even Cursor to vibe code tools and automate some specific jobs that we’re trying to get done. This includes where a specific task happens in one of our road-mapping tools or coding platforms and we wanna automate that task so that way people don’t have to worry about it.

We’re now able to build those functions and technologies that allow us to automate tasks, taking that administrative burden off of Klaviyo’s hands and just automating it with AI.

Interviewer: Why should someone join Klaviyo?

Drew Kull: I think folks should join Klaviyo starting with the mission first. We really wanna build the right products that help empower the creators to own their own destiny. This means building products that solve the problems for these business owners that allow them to focus on why they started the business, which is their passion.

Klaviyo wants builders, people who can go out, be high-agency, and build products that actually solve the customer problem and get the job done. So if you’re a builder who wants the freedom to run and solve actual customer problems, come join us at Klaviyo.

 

Interviewer: What is Klaviyo’s mission and why does it matter to you?

Madeleine Guttuso, Product Leader: Klaviyo’s mission is really important to me because it gives power back to brands to have those relationships with those consumers. Instead of brands needing to rely on a lot of third-party vendors in order to retain and acquire different customers, they can rely on Klaviyo to actually foster and own that channel going forward.

In the wake of a lot of these data regulations — consumer privacy rights, GDPR, CCPA, you name it — we are giving brands the technology to continue to own and foster those relationships with consumers without needing to rely on large third-party vendors that are your typical ad ventures where you would either acquire customers or retain customers.

Interviewer: What does AI first mean to you?

Madeleine Guttuso: AI first means we are leveraging tools that are at our disposal to really accelerate the software development lifecycle. Typically, that would take around six weeks prior to having all of these AI tools. We’re now down to less than two weeks in order to get an app into the market. I’m proud to say that I’ve been partnering most recently with a product manager and we’ve been able to develop an application in less than a week. In fact, I think we literally did it in a weekend and we are going to start testing that with users starting next week. And so, that lifecycle has really truncated from six weeks down to a week and a half. And I have a goal of trying to get that down to 48 hours, which allows us to test products, test new ideas in the market faster and actually have a faster time to value for us and our customers.

Interviewer: What is it like working at Klaviyo?

Madeleine Guttuso: I think working at Klaviyo is a very intense environment. And with the intensity comes a lot of love and passion for being able to deliver value to our customers.

With intensity comes rewards, and you are definitely rewarded for it being intense, being bold with your ideas and being able to deliver to drive value for the company and our customers.

 

 

Interviewer: Describe the type of person who thrives at Klaviyo.

Madeleine Guttuso: The type of person that thrives at Klaviyo is someone who’s a self-starter, is bold with their ideas, and sweats all of the small details. Someone that’s gonna be able to come into the organization, get their hands dirty with the details, really figure out what they need to do and when they need to do it, and is able to execute on a larger strategy and continue to deliver value to our customers as well as the company.