Director of Engineering, Infrastructure

About the role

The Director of Production Infrastructure at Klaviyo is a mission-critical role that directly influences the core foundations of our technology stack. Ensuring that our infrastructure is robust, scalable, and future-proof enables our engineering teams to accelerate product development effectively and safely, cementing Klaviyo’s position as an industry leader in empowering business growth.

Responsibilities

• Lead the definition of platform primitives such as compute runtimes, storage options, and service networking, ensuring they are scalable, secure, and aligned with Klaviyo's standards for operational excellence.
• Create and disseminate golden paths and decision trees that simplify the technological choices for R&D teams, enhancing consistency and self-sufficiency across engineering efforts.
• Drive initiatives that enhance the reliability of production systems, focusing on incident prevention, transparent response protocols, and proactive capacity planning.
• Collaborate with product teams to identify and eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks, aiding in improving the time-to-market for new services and increasing developer satisfaction.
• Establish frameworks for cost-effective infrastructure management, balancing financial discipline with flexibility and efficiency to maximize value delivery.
• Mentor and develop high-performing teams, fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, and productivity while steering teams toward achieving critical reliability and performance metrics.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to manage platform investments, clarify ownership, and safely implement infrastructure changes that drive strategic outcomes.
• Track and report critical performance metrics, such as system reliability, developer productivity, and infrastructure costs, enabling data-driven decision-making and accountability.
• Optimize the use of AI to enhance infrastructure management and development processes, pioneering innovative workflows that keep Klaviyo at the forefront of technological advancement.
• Champion operational readiness by establishing robust SLAs and SLIs, ensuring all infrastructure components meet defined performance thresholds conforming to Klaviyo's quality standards.
• Facilitate a culture of continuous learning and experimentation with AI tools, deploying enhancements that intelligently streamline engineering workflows.
• Lead a disciplined approach to incident management and postmortems, establishing a blameless culture of learning and innovation to minimize future disruptions.

Requirements

You have over 10 years of experience in infrastructure, SRE, platform engineering, or security engineering, with at least 5 years managing managers and senior ICs, demonstrating strong leadership and team-building skills.

Qualifications

• Your leadership style fosters inclusivity and empowerment, setting high standards that inspire your teams to achieve ambitious goals aligned with Klaviyo's mission.
• You possess a deep understanding of SRE principles, with proven expertise in designing effective SLOs and SLIs, managing incidents, and ensuring capacity planning and operational continuity.
• You have experience with LiveSite (the enterprise web platform) and understand the infrastructure requirements, integration patterns, and operational demands that come with supporting enterprise-grade web properties at scale.
• You own the live site, you bring urgency, clear judgment, and a structured approach to production incidents, and you build teams that treat uptime and reliability as first-order concerns, not afterthoughts. You have a proven track record of standing up or strengthening LiveSite culture inside engineering orgs.
• You excel at simplifying complexity and creating logical clarity, using your strong communication skills to drive organizational changes across product, data, and security domains.
• Your decision-making is driven by outcomes, and you're comfortable prioritizing initiatives that deliver the most significant business impact, even if it means narrowing the scope.
• Your hands-on experience with AI makes you AI-curious, and you're eager to leverage it to drive smarter, more efficient infrastructure operations.
• Your technical expertise is both broad and deep, you command public cloud services, container orchestration, service meshing, data storage, and observability at a systems level, and you remain hands-on when it counts, able to roll up your sleeves and debug a complex distributed-systems problem alongside your team.
• You build and nurture a culture of ownership and continuous improvement, encouraging your teams to innovate and excel while maintaining a strong focus on customer value.
• You possess a keen ability to balance strategic thinking with tactical execution, ensuring infrastructure solutions not only meet current needs but are future-proof and scalable.
• You are an org builder, you know how to scale a team thoughtfully, develop high-potential engineers into managers, and create the conditions for leaders to emerge and grow.
• You raise the bar relentlessly, you set high standards for engineering excellence, hold yourself and your teams accountable to those standards, and invest continuously in growing the people around you.
• You are an org builder, you know how to scale a team thoughtfully, develop high-potential engineers into managers, and create the conditions for leaders to emerge and grow.
• You raise the bar relentlessly, you set high standards for engineering excellence, hold yourself and your teams accountable to those standards, and invest continuously in growing the people around you.
• You are an org builder, you know how to scale a team thoughtfully, develop high-potential engineers into managers, and create the conditions for leaders to emerge and grow.
• You raise the bar relentlessly, you set high standards for engineering excellence, hold yourself and your teams accountable to those standards, and invest continuously in growing the people around you.
• You bring a security-first mindset to infrastructure decisions, with experience partnering closely with security engineering teams to build platforms that are secure by design and operationally hardened.

Skills

• Strong leadership and team-building skills.
• Proven expertise in SRE principles, including designing effective SLOs and SLIs, managing incidents, and ensuring capacity planning and operational continuity.
• Experience with LiveSite and understanding its infrastructure requirements, integration patterns, and operational demands.
• Hands-on experience with AI and a proven track record of leveraging it to drive smarter, more efficient infrastructure operations.
• Broad and deep technical expertise in public cloud services, container orchestration, service meshing, data storage, and observability.
• A security-first mindset, with experience partnering closely with security engineering teams to build platforms that are secure by design and operationally hardened.

Benefits

• Committed to fostering a learning environment, seeking ways to improve team skills, processes, and technologies to align with Klaviyo's growth and innovation objectives.

Pay

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.

Schedule

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.