Job description

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. AI Engineer, Customer Agent About the Role At Klaviyo, we believe the future of software lies not only in tools that help people work more efficiently, but in intelligent systems that can take action, learn from outcomes, and improve customer experiences over time. Klaviyo serves more than 167,000 customers and processes billions of consumer profiles, messages, interactions, and conversion signals. This creates a unique opportunity to build state-of-the-art AI systems that help businesses create and execute better customer experiences at scale. We’re looking for an AI Engineer to join the Customer Agent team, Klaviyo’s AI-native conversational platform. You’ll help build scalable backend systems and AI-powered product experiences that enable agents to retrieve context, use tools, and take reliable action on behalf of customers. This is a backend-heavy role with opportunities to contribute to user-facing experiences . You’ll independently own meaningful pieces of larger systems, contribute to technical decisions, and continue developing your depth across backend engineering, applied AI, and production reliability. How You Will Make a Difference Build and improve reliable backend systems and APIs that power AI-driven customer experiences. Develop production agentic features involving tool use, context management, retrieval, structured outputs, orchestration, and multi-step workflows. Contribute to solving applied AI problems across retrieval and RAG, grounding, hallucination mitigation, model selection, and choosing between LLM-based, deterministic, or hybrid approaches. Build and use evaluation approaches including representative datasets, automated and human evaluation, regression testing, qualitative error analysis, and production signals. Improve system reliability through guardrails, retries, fallbacks, observability, monitoring, and thoughtful failure handling. Build asynchronous and distributed processing workflows that support AI workloads at scale. Participate in an on-call rotation and help diagnose, mitigate, and learn from production incidents. Work with external customers and cross-functional partners to understand workflows, identify pain points, and translate feedback into product improvements. Monitor shipped experiences and use quality metrics, system performance, and customer feedback to guide iteration. Who You Are You have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience , with experience building backend systems or distributed applications. You have hands-on experience building or contributing to generative AI or agentic AI applications , ideally used by real users or in production environments. You are proficient in Python and have experience with modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI or Django. You have experience with asynchronous processing or distributed task/event systems such as Celery, Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or Redis. You have working knowledge of databases, data modeling, APIs, and persistence patterns used in production systems. You are comfortable working in cloud environments and have experience with technologies such as AWS, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, or CI/CD systems. You can reason about tradeoffs among quality, latency, cost, reliability, and implementation complexity, and know when to seek additional technical context. You are comfortable working through ambiguity, breaking larger problems into smaller pieces, and making progress without every requirement being fully specified. You have experience with, or strong interest in, working directly with external customers to understand problems and improve products. You care about shipping useful, reliable products and are motivated to deepen your engineering judgment in a rapidly evolving technical space. Nice to Have Experience training, fine-tuning, distilling, or otherwise adapting machine learning or language models. Experience with reinforcement learning or feedback-driven optimization. Experience with evaluation infrastructure such as LLM-as-judge systems, evaluator calibration, benchmark datasets, or AI quality tooling. Experience operating AI systems at meaningful production scale or optimizing inference cost, latency, or throughput. #indeedRD - 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. Base Pay Range For US Locations: $116,000 — $174,000 USD 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. IMPORTANT NOTICE: Our company takes the security and privacy of job applicants very seriously. We will never ask for payment, bank details, or personal financial information as part of the application process. All our legitimate job postings can be found on our official career site. Please be cautious of job offers that come from non-company email addresses (@klaviyo.com), instant messaging platforms, or unsolicited calls. By clicking "Submit Application" you consent to Klaviyo processing your Personal Data in accordance with our Job Applicant Privacy Notice. If you do not wish for Klaviyo to process your Personal Data, please do not submit an application. You can find our Job Applicant Privacy Notice here and here (FR).

Requirements

Must-haves

How You Will Make a Difference
Build and improve reliable backend systems and APIs that power AI-driven customer experiences.
Develop production agentic features involving tool use, context management, retrieval, structured outputs, orchestration, and multi-step workflows.
Contribute to solving applied AI problems across retrieval and RAG, grounding, hallucination mitigation, model selection, and choosing between LLM-based, deterministic, or hybrid approaches.
Build and use evaluation approaches including representative datasets, automated and human evaluation, regression testing, qualitative error analysis, and production signals.
Improve system reliability through guardrails, retries, fallbacks, observability, monitoring, and thoughtful failure handling.
Build asynchronous and distributed processing workflows that support AI workloads at scale.
Participate in an on-call rotation and help diagnose, mitigate, and learn from production incidents.
Work with external customers and cross-functional partners to understand workflows, identify pain points, and translate feedback into product improvements.
Monitor shipped experiences and use quality metrics, system performance, and customer feedback to guide iteration.
You have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience , with experience building backend systems or distributed applications.
You have hands-on experience building or contributing to generative AI or agentic AI applications , ideally used by real users or in production environments.
You are proficient in Python and have experience with modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.
You have experience with asynchronous processing or distributed task/event systems such as Celery, Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or Redis.
You have working knowledge of databases, data modeling, APIs, and persistence patterns used in production systems.
You are comfortable working in cloud environments and have experience with technologies such as AWS, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, or CI/CD systems.
You can reason about tradeoffs among quality, latency, cost, reliability, and implementation complexity, and know when to seek additional technical context.
You are comfortable working through ambiguity, breaking larger problems into smaller pieces, and making progress without every requirement being fully specified.

Nice-to-haves

Experience training, fine-tuning, distilling, or otherwise adapting machine learning or language models.
Experience with reinforcement learning or feedback-driven optimization.
Experience with evaluation infrastructure such as LLM-as-judge systems, evaluator calibration, benchmark datasets, or AI quality tooling.
Experience operating AI systems at meaningful production scale or optimizing inference cost, latency, or throughput.
Get to Know Klaviyo
AI fluency at Klaviyo includes responsible use of AI (including privacy, security, bias awareness, and human-in-the-loop). We provide accommodations as needed.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aillmpythonawskubernetesci/cdmachine learning

Platform: greenhouse
Effort: quick