Principal Engineer, Enterprise Scalability

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 klaviyo.com/careers to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.

Here’s a rewrite that uses the structure and tone of the Axon example, adapted for Klaviyo’s senior technical IC role. It makes ownership clearer, keeps the hands-on expectations prominent, and separates candidate qualifications from measures of success.

At Klaviyo, we help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers. As our customers grow, our platform needs to support greater data volumes, more demanding workloads, and increasingly complex operations—with the performance and reliability they depend on.

Engineering at this scale takes technical depth, sound judgment, and close collaboration. You’ll work across teams to solve challenging problems, turn architectural improvements into production results, and help build a platform ready for our largest customers.

Your Impact

We are seeking a senior technical leader to own Klaviyo’s approach to enterprise scalability, performance, reliability, and multi-region readiness. Reporting to a VP of Engineering, you will be a senior individual contributor with no direct reports. You will lead through technical expertise, hands-on engineering, and influence, partnering across teams to deliver improvements that matter to our customers.

You will identify and remove major bottlenecks, drive platform-wide architectural changes, and establish clear measures of readiness for our largest tenants and most demanding workloads. Your work will span system design, profiling, implementation, and production rollout. You will also help teams adopt practical tools and repeatable patterns that make performance and reliability part of everyday engineering.

This role suits an experienced engineer who can move between deep technical investigation and clear executive communication, make and defend architectural decisions, and build alignment across teams.

Reports to: VP of Engineering
Direct reports: None

What You’ll Do

• Define what scale readiness means. Establish measurable targets for latency, throughput, error rates, and capacity. Build a shared scorecard and align teams on service-level objectives, error budgets, and performance expectations for critical enterprise workloads.

• Remove the bottlenecks that matter most. Use production data, profiling, and reproducible benchmarks to identify constraints. Partner with service owners to implement fixes and verify improvements under representative workloads.

• Drive architectural change. Design and implement sharding, partitioning, caching, back-pressure, and workload isolation strategies. Advance multi-region readiness and build safe paths for high-volume data migrations.

• Make scale engineering repeatable. Create lightweight benchmarks, profiling harnesses, and test environments that teams can use independently. Pair with engineers to turn successful fixes into reusable patterns.

• Build readiness into delivery. Lead scalability reviews and establish clear, proportionate release gates that surface risks early and help teams ship confidently.

• Turn incidents into lasting improvements. Lead technical deep dives, identify systemic causes, and work with teams to deliver and validate fixes that reduce recurring incidents.

• Apply AI where it improves outcomes. Use AI-assisted profiling, workload modeling, synthetic traffic, anomaly detection, and guided runbooks to improve investigation and response. Establish explicit guardrails, evaluate results, and measure operational impact.

• Connect engineering decisions to customer needs. Communicate priorities, tradeoffs, and results clearly to engineers and executives, tying technical investments to customer experience, enterprise growth, and operating efficiency.

What You’ll Bring

• Deep experience scaling multi-tenant SaaS. You bring 12+ years of relevant engineering experience, with a track record of removing significant bottlenecks and demonstrating measurable production impact.

• Strong performance and distributed systems expertise. You have hands-on experience with performance engineering, capacity planning, sharding and partitioning, caching, back-pressure, tenant isolation, multi-region architectures, and large-scale migrations.

• Engineering depth from diagnosis through delivery. You can investigate unfamiliar systems, test hypotheses, write production code, and work with service owners to roll out changes safely.

• Sound technical judgment. You use evidence to weigh architectural tradeoffs and know when to address an immediate constraint versus invest in a broader platform change.

• Leadership across organizational boundaries. You align teams around shared outcomes, clarify ownership, and build practical standards that help engineers move faster.

• Clear communication. You explain complex technical decisions and their business implications to both engineering and executive audiences.

• Practical AI fluency. You have applied AI tools or automation to engineering work and can evaluate their usefulness, limitations, and operational risks. You are curious about new approaches and disciplined about validating them.

What Success Looks Like in 6–12 Months

• A company-wide scale scorecard is adopted and reviewed regularly, with agreed targets and clear ownership for critical enterprise workloads.

• Two to three high-impact bottlenecks are removed, with reproducible benchmarks demonstrating sustained improvements.

• Our largest customer workloads show measurable improvements in tail latency, throughput, and error rates.

• Multi-region readiness and high-volume migration plans have clear priorities, tested assumptions, and actionable next steps.

• Teams use shared benchmarks and readiness checks to catch regressions earlier, and repeat P0 incidents decline.

• AI-assisted tools demonstrate measurable value in investigation or incident response, such as faster regression isolation or fewer noisy alerts, with appropriate controls and observability.

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.

Massachusetts Applicants:
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Our salary range reflects the cost of labor across various U.S. geographic markets. The range displayed below reflects the minimum and maximum target salaries for the position across all our US locations. 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.

This role may require up to 10% travel for purposes such as new hire onboarding, client or partner work if applicable, team meetings, and industry events. Travel is coordinated in advance.

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.