Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI (Customer Agent)
Job Location:
Boston, MA - USA
Monthly Salary:
Posted:
Application Deadline:
Vacancies:
Job Summary
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 youre a close but not exact match with the description we hope youll still consider applying. Want to learn more about life at Klaviyo Visit see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.
Are you looking for one of the most impactful AI-native leadership roles in Boston Join us at Klaviyo and lead the team building Customer Agent a conversational AI system that enables brands to interact with their customers at a scale they have never achieved before.
Customer Agent is central to Klaviyos vision for AI-powered customer engagement. It delivers real-time contextually aware conversations that help brands support convert and retain millions of consumers. We are just beginning to unlock what is possible and we are looking for an engineering leader who is eager to define that future. Were 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 Senior Engineering Manager youll own the team building Customer Agent from the ground up. This isnt a pure people-management seat: we need someone who genuinely enjoys developing people and building a team and is equally comfortable writing and shipping code reviewing architecture and debugging production issues themselves. Youll partner with product data science and go-to-market leaders to turn ambiguous customer problems into a reliable extensible agent platform and youll be judged on outcomes: agent quality reliability and the business impact of what your team ships.
How You Will Make an Impact:- Stay hands-on with the technology: write and ship code when it matters review architecture unblock hard technical problems and make the call on reliability trade-offs yourself.
- Guide system design for orchestration evaluation and guardrail systems that keep autonomous agent behavior safe and trustworthy at scale.
- Own your teams mission strategy and roadmap and directly manage some workstreams yourself.
- Manage and grow a team of full-stack and AI engineers including hiring leveling and career development.
- Both give and receive meaningful feedback focusing on empathy curiosity and investment in growth.
- Partner with product data science and go-to-market teams to translate customer needs into a technical roadmap.
- Youve shipped a production agentic system that makes autonomous choices on live customer-facing traffic and personally owned the hardest agent problems: orchestration evaluation frameworks as a quality gate guardrails and failure handling on non-deterministic output.
- 8 years in software engineering building software products and 4 years managing engineering teams with clear communication across technical and business audiences.
- Credibility comes from the work itself not just org-chart authority: youre still hands-on enough to write and ship code debug production issues and make architecture calls yourself.
- Genuinely enjoy developing people and building a team: hiring leveling coaching and giving direct feedback arent a chore for you theyre a core part of the job you want.
- Possess a deep practical mastery of engineering architectures required to build and maintain highly scalable systems in production.
- Proven track record of leading and shipping complex multi-quarter initiatives that require tight coordination across multiple engineering teams.
- Comfortable owning the hard parts of people management: conducting performance reviews and mentoring engineers at all career levels with investment and empathy.
Nice to Haves:
- Experience running a multi-tenant agent platform at production scale where external customers configure their own agent behavior on shared infrastructure.
- A track record of turning a single-team tool into shared infrastructure that other teams build on.
- Experience mentoring engineering managers or leads not just individual contributors.
Boston MA - In-Office Role
-
Required Experience:
Manager
About Company
Klaviyo unifies AI-powered email marketing and SMS to drive growth, retention, and measurable results. Build personalized, omnichannel experiences across WhatsApp, ecommerce, and more with K:AI Agents.
