Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Role details

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. At Klaviyo, we empower creators to own their destiny. Our SaaS platform provides businesses of all sizes with powerful, easy-to-use marketing automation tools, making first-party data accessible and actionable like never before. We are a team of ambitious, bold peers who are insatiably curious and meticulous in our craft. As we scale globally, we are seeking a foundational leader to build and lead our Site Reliability functions from our new strategic hub in Dublin. About the Team The SRE team is the bedrock of trust for the 200,000+ businesses that rely on Klaviyo to power their growth. This team is responsible for the secure reliability, scalability, and performance of our entire platform: from our core data processing pipelines to our cutting-edge AI services. As a foundational leader in our new Dublin office, you will build this team from the ground up, establishing a center of excellence for platform integrity and playing a pivotal role in Klaviyo’s European expansion. You will be the ultimate custodian of the trust our customers place in us every day. How You'll Make a Difference Architect and Lead: Define the vision, strategy, and roadmap for a unified SRE organization. You will build and mentor a world-class, multi-disciplinary team of engineers in Dublin, fostering a culture of operational excellence, proactive problem-solving, and blameless learning. Champion Reliability: Drive a "reliable by design" philosophy across all of engineering. Partner with product and platform teams to embed reliability principles into the entire software development lifecycle, from initial design to production deployment. Own Platform Integrity: Take ownership of the availability, latency, performance efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response, and capacity planning for Klaviyo’s global platform. Drive Automation: Build the "paved road" for Klaviyo engineers by developing automated, self-service tooling and infrastructure that enables teams to "move fast, no shortcuts". Lead Through Incidents: Command reliability incidents, guiding teams to rapid resolution while fostering a culture of blameless post-mortems that drive meaningful, systemic improvements. Who You Are You are a proven engineering leader with a track record of building and scaling high-performing, geographically distributed teams in a fast-paced SaaS environment. You are intellectually curious and a continuous learner, with a deep understanding of modern reliability principles. You are a "Driver" who is biased toward action. You don’t wait for problems to find you; you proactively identify risks and rally teams to solve them. You are a cross-functional influencer and an exceptional communicator, capable of articulating complex technical concepts to diverse audiences, from engineers to executives to enterprise customers. You are a player-coach who can dive deep into technical details with your team while also developing and articulating a long-term strategic vision. You are passionate about building a strong, inclusive team culture and have experience integrating new teams with existing ones across different time zones and cultures. You thrive in an environment of high ambiguity and rapid change, embodying a "1% done" mindset and seeing opportunity in every challenge. What You'll Need 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5+ years in a leadership role managing SRE teams. Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams, ideally with experience establishing a new team or office. Deep, hands-on experience with cloud-native production systems at scale (AWS preferred). Strong technical background in distributed systems, observability, container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and CI/CD principles. Experience managing geographically distributed teams and fostering a strong, unified culture across multiple time zones. You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects, and you’re excited to dive in and learn fast. You’re hungry to responsibly explore new AI tools and workflows, finding ways to make your work smarter and more efficient. Our salary range reflects the cost of labour in the country where the job post is advertised. 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 in Local Currency: €160.000 - €240.000 EUR 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 cr