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 careers.klaviyo.com to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.
Klaviyo powers growth for businesses by helping them reach customers on the right channel at the right moment. As Director of Engineering, Messaging Infrastructure, you will lead the teams that build and operate the core, multi-tenant platform that sends and receives messages at massive scale across email, SMS, mobile push, WhatsApp, and future channels. Your organization will own the services, pipelines, and integrations that ensure messages are delivered fast, reliably, and compliantly—so product teams can innovate confidently and our customers can trust us with their most valuable communications. Success in this role means higher deliverability, lower latency and cost-per-message, stronger privacy & compliance posture, and faster developer velocity across Klaviyo.
How You’ll Make a Difference- Own the messaging platform end to end (ingestion, orchestration, templating/rendering, scheduling, routing, send, feedback loops, analytics)—with clear SLOs, scalable multi-region architecture, and a measurable reliability posture (e.g., error budgets, MTTR, incident rate).
- Increase deliverability & throughput by advancing our MTA/SMS provider strategies, queueing and rate-limiting, channel-specific features (e.g., pre-flight checks, warm-up), and feedback processing (bounces, complaints, carrier responses).
- Harden compliance & safety in partnership with Legal/Privacy (e.g., consent/state management, opt-out, quiet hours, TCPA/CAN‑SPAM/CTIA/GDPR-aware workflows) to protect customers and their end-users.
- Accelerate developer velocity for channel teams via clear APIs, SDKs, contracts, documentation, and paved-road tooling (test environments, canaries, shadow traffic, feature flags, progressive delivery).
- Deliver business impact by tying platform choices to measurable outcomes (deliverability %, send latency, success rate, $/MM, cycle time), setting an annual platform strategy and quarterly commitments.
- Build and scale a high-performing org of managers and senior ICs; raise the talent bar through crisp expectations, transparent feedback, and career growth paths aligned to Klaviyo’s standards.
- Transform workflows with AI. Put AI at the center of how the org plans, operates, and learns—using it to streamline incident response, speed root-cause analysis, optimize capacity, and improve developer productivity.
- Set vision & roadmap: Define a 12–18 month technical strategy for Messaging Infrastructure; translate it into quarterly, outcomes-based plans with clear tradeoffs and risks.
- Architect for scale & resiliency: Guide design for high-throughput streaming, durable queues, idempotent processing, multi-tenant isolation, and multi-region failover; champion observability-first development.
- Operational excellence: Establish SLOs and on-call practices; lead major incident reviews with a blameless, action-oriented posture; drive cost efficiency and capacity planning.
- Partner deeply: Work with Product, Security, Data, and GTM teams to align on customer requirements, roadmaps, and launch readiness; represent the platform in exec forums.
- Elevate engineering quality: Institutionalize design reviews, threat modeling, test strategies, and change management that reduce cycle time while protecting reliability.
- Talent & culture: Hire exceptional people, develop managers, and model urgency, ownership, and accountability—rewarding impact and raising the bar on what “good” looks like at scale.
- Continuously experiment with AI—testing tools, sharing learning, and championing new applications that responsibly accelerate org workflows and elevate quality.
- Platform-minded leader with a track record building/operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems (messaging, streaming, or analogous high-throughput platforms). You’re hands-on enough to dig into architecture, but you lead through clarity, metrics, and great managers.
- Owner of outcomes. You connect engineering choices to business results—deliverability, latency, reliability, developer velocity, and cost—and hold teams accountable for moving those numbers.
- High-intensity, high-urgency operator who thrives in ambiguity, makes crisp tradeoffs, and ships ambitious, reliable systems on a predictable cadence.
- Inclusive people leader experienced in growing managers and senior ICs, building healthy on-call cultures, and scaling organizations across hubs.
- Strong partner & communicator who can translate complex systems into simple narratives for executives, customers, and cross-functional peers.
- AI-fluent builder. You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are excited to learn fast and responsibly integrate AI into everyday workflows.
- Domain experience with email MTAs, SMS aggregators/carrier networks, push services, or deliverability tooling.
- Prior leadership of multi-region or hybrid-cloud systems, and experience setting SLOs/error budgets at platform boundaries.
- Background in privacy-aware systems (e.g., consent orchestration, data residency, data retention/TTL strategies).
- Experience improving developer experience (APIs/SDKs, golden paths, internal platforms) for 10+ product teams.
- Hub-based, hybrid collaboration; on-call coverage appropriate to mission-critical systems.
- Interview process emphasizes technical depth, leadership behaviors (ownership, urgency, accountability), and measurable impact.
- We value candidates who are rigorous, curious, and driven to create leverage for every Klaviyo developer and customer.
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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
Our salary range reflects the cost of labour in the country where the job post is advertised. 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.
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.
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What We Do
Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO) is the B2C CRM. Powered by its built-in data platform and AI, Klaviyo combines marketing automation, analytics, and customer service into one unified solution, making it easy for businesses to know their customers and grow faster. Klaviyo (CLAY-vee-oh) helps over 183,000 brands like Mattel, Glossier, Daily Harvest, and Liquid Death deliver 1:1 experiences at scale, improve efficiency, and drive revenue.
Why Work With Us
We refer to our employees as ‘Klaviyos’, and we make up a diverse community united around shared values: We’re curious, collaborative, driven, innovative, fun, and fully ourselves at work. No matter which team you join, your work won’t just impact Klaviyo. It’ll help empower our customers and enable creators across the globe to own their destinies.
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