{"id":392571,"url":"https://alion.io/job/klaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent","title":"Sr. Lead Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)","company":{"id":6845,"name":"Klaviyo","domain":"klaviyo.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/klaviyo","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":82,"open_postings":21,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.714,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":57,"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Boston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":216000,"max":324000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":324000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Healing","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-29T16:24:14Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T05:18:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":88,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":88},"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.\nSenior Lead Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)\nAbout the Team:\nOur Engineering team builds the AI systems that power how brands run their businesses on Klaviyo. We move fast, ship in production, and hold a high bar for what \"AI-native\" actually means: systems that make real judgment calls, not demos.\nThe Customer Agent team is one of the newest and most ambitious groups in that org, based in Boston and working in-office: we're building a conversational AI system that lets brands serve their own customers at a scale no human support team could match. We're still small enough that a single senior engineer can shape how the whole platform evolves. 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.\nAbout the Role:\nAs Senior Lead Engineer, you'll set technical and product direction for Customer Agent end to end, building a 0-to-1 agentic product with the speed and ownership of a startup, backed by the scale and resources of one of the most innovative tech companies on the East Coast, while staying hands-on with the hardest problems yourself. This is a principal-caliber individual contributor role: we're looking for an engineer who has personally architected, built, scaled, and supported a production agentic system through everything that comes after the demo, and who acts as a force multiplier across the org through the strength of their technical judgment.\nHow You'll Make an Impact:\nSet the technical and product direction for Customer Agent's core platform, from architecture through production.\nTake on the platform's hardest technical problems personally: orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, memory & context, self-healing/improving and failure handling for non-deterministic systems.\nWrite and ship code, review designs, and make the calls other engineers can't make alone.\nBuild architecture and frameworks that other engineers and teams adopt, and mentor through design reviews rather than direct management.\nPartner with product, design, data science, and go-to-market leaders to shape the roadmap, not just execute against it.\nEvaluate emerging AI technologies and bring the ones worth betting on into production.\nWhat We're Looking For:\nYou've architected, built, scaled, and supported a production agentic system end to end, not just prototyped one: real orchestration, evals, guardrails, and non-deterministic failure handling. You've owned it through launch, scale, incidents, and the years of operational reality after the demo.\nYou've learned the hard lessons that only come from running agents in production: securing them against misuse and abuse, and the operational scar tissue of keeping a non-deterministic system reliable as usage grows.\nYou've set technical and product direction for an entire product area before, not just your own component, and you can point to something you designed and championed that shipped and that other teams built on.\nYou've stayed hands-on through all of it: still writing code, reviewing your own architecture decisions, and debugging production issues yourself, not delegating the hardest problems away.\nYour past architecture and frameworks got reused by other teams, and you've unblocked multiple teams at once, not just your own.\nYou communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly across engineering, product, and executive audiences, and you can turn an undefined problem into a plan others rally behind.\nNice to Haves:\nExperience running a multi-tenant agent platform at production scale, where external customers configure their own agent behavior on shared infrastructure.\nExperience building 0-to-1 products or working in startup environments.\nA track record with production evaluation systems, AI observability, or human-in-the-loop workflows for LLM-powered products.\nBoston, MA - In-Office Role\n-\nMassachusetts Applicants:\n 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.\nOur 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.\nIn 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. \nYour recruiter can provide more details about the specific salary/OTE range for your preferred location during the hiring process.\nBase Pay Range For US Locations:\n$216,000—$324,000 USD\nThis 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.\nGet to Know Klaviyo\nWe’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.\nAI fluency at Klaviyo includes responsible use of AI (including privacy, security, bias awareness, and human-in-the-loop). We provide accommodations as needed. \nBy 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.\n\nKlaviyo 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.\nIMPORTANT 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.\nBy 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).","description_format":"text","description_chars":8058,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Marketing Automation","Email Marketing","Customer Data Platforms (CDP) & Reverse ETL"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T23:28:24Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 55 · green card filings: 24","filings_12m":55,"filings_prev_12m":39,"green_card_filings_12m":24,"median_offered_wage_usd":152500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":50}],"liveness":{"score":19,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.517,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":88,"expected_fill_days":57,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":324000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/klaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/klaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T08:39:43Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":11575,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":6845},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=6845"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fklaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fklaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fklaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/klaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fklaviyo-sr-lead-engineer-applied-ai-customer-agent"}]}