Director of Engineering, Messaging Infrastructure

Klaviyo powers growth for businesses by helping them reach customers on the right channel at the right moment. AsDirector 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 compliantlyso 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 Youll 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/CANSPAM/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 Klaviyos standards.
• Transform workflows with AI. Put AI at the center of how the org plans operates and learnsusing it to streamline incident response speed root-cause analysis optimize capacity and improve developer productivity.

What Youll Do

• Set vision & roadmap: Define a 1218 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 accountabilityrewarding impact and raising the bar on what good looks like at scale.
• Continuously experiment with AItesting tools sharing learning and championing new applications that responsibly accelerate org workflows and elevate quality.

Who You Are

• Platform-minded leader with a track record building/operating large-scale low-latency distributed systems (messaging streaming or analogous high-throughput platforms). Youre 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 resultsdeliverability latency reliability developer velocity and costand 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. Youve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are excited to learn fast and responsibly integrate AI into everyday workflows.

Nice to Haves (Helpful not required)

• 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.

How We Work

• 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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Required Experience:

Director