About this role
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.
Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI (Customer Agent)
Are you looking for one of the most impactful AI-native leadership roles in Boston? Join us at Klaviyo and lead the team building 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 Klaviyo’s 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 an engineering leader who is eager to define that future. We're past the demo stage: the team ships changes against live customer traffic, measures quality with real evaluation frameworks, and treats reliability as a product feature, not an afterthought.
About the Role: As Senior Engineering Manager, you'll own the team building Customer Agent from the ground up. This isn't a pure people-management seat: we need someone who genuinely enjoys developing people and building a team, and is equally comfortable writing and shipping code, reviewing architecture, and debugging production issues themselves. You'll partner with product, data science, and go-to-market leaders to turn ambiguous customer problems into a reliable, extensible agent platform, and you'll be judged on outcomes: agent quality, reliability, and the business impact of what your team ships.
How You Will Make an Impact:
• Stay hands-on with the technology: write and ship code when it matters, review architecture, unblock hard technical problems, and make the call on reliability trade-offs yourself.
• Guide system design for orchestration, evaluation, and guardrail systems that keep autonomous agent behavior safe and trustworthy at scale.
• Own your team's mission, strategy, and roadmap, and directly manage some workstreams yourself.
• Manage and grow a team of full-stack and AI engineers, including hiring, leveling, and career development.
• Both give and receive meaningful feedback focusing on empathy, curiosity, and investment in growth.
• Partner with product, data science, and go-to-market teams to translate customer needs into a technical roadmap.
Who You Are:
• You've shipped a production agentic system that makes autonomous choices on live, customer-facing traffic, and personally owned the hardest agent problems: orchestration, evaluation fram