Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

At Klaviyo, we value the unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives each team member brings to our workplace. We believe everyone deserves a fair shot at success and appreciate experiences beyond traditional job requirements. If you’re a close but not exact match with the description, we hope you’ll still consider applying.

Team Overview

The mission of the Platform Engineering team is to provide the infrastructure primitives, platforms, tooling, and guidance that let every engineering team at Klaviyo build, ship, and operate with confidence. We own the paved path for how product teams manage their services, applications, and data — spanning core infrastructure, observability, databases, and queuing.

Responsibilities

• Build a deep understanding of engineering needs across the organization, guiding the design and development of the right platform primitives (infrastructure, databases, queuing, and more) and balancing the platform's vision with the practical needs of product teams
• Set the technical vision and long-term roadmap for core platform services, translating organizational priorities into a clear, multi-year plan
• Own the design, development, and evolution of foundational platform primitives that product teams rely on to ship quickly and safely
• Lead cross-team initiatives that improve the availability, scalability, latency, and cost-efficiency of Klaviyo’s core platforms, and drive adoption of the resulting paved paths
• Identify systemic gaps and architectural bottlenecks, and lead the design and delivery of solutions
• Leverage technologies such as Python, Go, AWS, and Kubernetes to advance the platform, partnering closely with security and product engineering leaders
• Champion best practices across the organization, including technical design review, configuration as code, and defensive programming
• Drive cost-optimization efforts across the platform — right-sizing infrastructure, improving resource utilization, and building the tooling and guardrails that make cost-efficiency the default
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, raising the bar for technical quality and engineering craft across the Platform Engineering org
• Participate in and help evolve on-call practices, with a focus on solving issues at the root, preventing recurrence, and minimizing alert fatigue
• Experiment with AI in work or personal projects, and responsibly explore new AI tools and workflows to make your work smarter and more efficient

Requirements

• BA or BS degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a track record of technical leadership
• Deep, hands-on experience developing production software in Python and/or Go
• Extensive experience working in cloud-native environments, with hands-on ownership of infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform) and containerized platforms (e.g. Kubernetes)
• Fundamental understanding of Linux and all layers of the networking stack; comfortable administering and debugging production systems
• Experience across a range of platform-related domains such as API gateways & traffic management, observability, asynchronous processing, or database/storage platforms
• Proven ability to independently own the full lifecycle of complex, cross-team platform initiatives — from discovery and technical design through rollout and long-term maintenance
• Strong track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team
• Excellent communicator who writes clear technical design docs and RFCs, and keeps stakeholders aligned on progress, risk, and trade-offs
• Comfortable handling complex systems in outage situations and driving failures to root cause and resolution

Nice to have

• Familiarity with high-volume data processing and storage systems, including OLTP and OLAP databases
• Experience with large-scale data ecosystems — e.g., ClickHouse, DynamoDB, MySQL, Kafka, Spark, Flink, Iceberg, or Airflow
• Background in internal tooling or paved-path platform design

Tech Stack

Klaviyo’s platform is primarily built with Python and React and runs on AWS. Engineers join us from a wide range of technical backgrounds and are supported in learning our stack.

• Python / Django / FastAPI / Go
• MySQL / Redis / Memcached
• RabbitMQ / Celery / Apache Kafka / Apache Pulsar
• AWS / Terraform / Kubernetes

Location & Work Model

This role is based in Boston, Massachusetts. Klaviyo supports work authorization and relocation for this position. The 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.

Pay

Our salary range reflects the cost of labor across various U.S. geographic markets. 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.

Base Pay Range for US Locations: $176,000—$264,000 USD

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.