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Senior Lead Engineer Customer Agent

Are you looking for one of the most impactful AI-native engineering roles in Boston Join us at Klaviyo and help build 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 a senior technical leader who is eager to define that future.

We are seeking an experienced engineer with deep expertise building and scaling agentic systems and AI-enabled products. You will shape how Customer Agent evolves into a highly extensible reliable and intelligent platform. You will drive technical strategy lead architectural direction and partner closely with product design data science and engineering leaders to deliver industry-defining AI experiences.

This role is ideal for a hands-on technical leader who thrives in ambiguity enjoys building from first principles and wants to influence both product direction and engineering strategy. You will be expected to operate as a force multiplier across teams leading through technical excellence execution and mentorship rather than direct people management.

You will work on some of Klaviyos most important AI investments helping define the next generation of conversational experiences while operating at the intersection of large-scale systems agentic workflows personalization and real-world customer outcomes.

How You Will Make a Difference

• Lead the architecture design and implementation of Customer Agents core platform and AI capabilities.
• Drive technical strategy and long-term system evolution for conversational AI experiences serving millions of users.
• Build and ship complex AI-powered product features balancing speed quality reliability and customer impact.
• Partner closely with Product Design Data Science GTM and Engineering leaders to define product direction and execution plans.
• Make critical technical decisions around agent architectures orchestration frameworks retrieval systems memory tool use evaluation and reliability.
• Establish engineering best practices around observability testing monitoring experimentation and operational excellence for AI systems.
• Lead large cross-functional initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations.
• Mentor engineers through technical leadership design reviews architecture discussions and hands-on collaboration.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and frameworks identifying opportunities to create meaningful customer value.
• Influence engineering standards and contribute to the broader technical direction of Klaviyos AI platform.

Who You Are

• 12 years of software engineering experience building and operating production systems at scale.
• Significant experience designing and shipping customer-facing AI-powered products or agentic systems.
• Strong backend engineering and distributed systems fundamentals with the ability to reason about scale latency reliability and operational tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated expertise with modern AI architectures including LLM-powered applications retrieval systems agent workflows orchestration evaluation frameworks and guardrails.
• Proven ability to lead complex multi-quarter technical initiatives involving multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Strong product instincts and the ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous fast-moving environments and defining direction when requirements are incomplete.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across engineering product design and executive audiences.
• Hands-on builder who enjoys working directly in code and tackling difficult technical problems.
• Track record of influencing engineering organizations through technical leadership mentorship and execution excellence.

Bonus Points

• Experience building conversational AI customer support automation or agentic workflow platforms.
• Experience with production evaluation systems AI observability human-in-the-loop workflows and reliability engineering for LLM-powered products.
• Experience building 01 products or working in startup environments.
• We love recovering entrepreneurs. If youve ever run your own thing youll have company on our team.

Boston MA In-Office Role

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