Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise Scalability

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. Be Klaviyo’s senior IC for scale, you will report into a VP of Engineering and lead performance, reliability, multi‑region, and large‑tenant readiness. You’ll drive platform-wide architectural change, hunt bottlenecks and optimize systems, and partner across teams to productionize improvements. Given that this is an IC role with no direct reports; you will lead via technical depth, hands‑on impact, and crisp cross‑org alignment. What You’ll Do Define enterprise scalability fitness functions (latency/throughput/error rates) and a scorecard; align teams to SLOs and budgets. Design/implement sharding and partitioning strategies, caching/back‑pressure, multi‑region readiness, and high‑volume migration paths. Build lightweight enablement: benchmarks, profiling harnesses, reproducible testbeds; pair with teams to land fixes. Lead scalability reviews and readiness gates that accelerate—not block—delivery; drive incident deep dives tied to systemic fixes. Communicate clearly to execs and engineers, tying technical work to business impact and customer outcomes. Integrate AI into scale and resiliency work—from proactive anomaly detection to synthetic load and guided runbooks—so performance improvements stick and incidents don’t repeat. Who You Are Experience: 12+ years scaling multi‑tenant SaaS with a reputation for removing major bottlenecks and proving impact with data. Technical expertise: Performance engineering, capacity planning, sharding/partitioning, caching/back‑pressure, multi‑region readiness, and high‑volume migrations; you turn hotspots into robust patterns. AI tools & automation: You apply AI to scale work—profiling assistance, workload modeling, synthetic traffic generation, anomaly detection, and runbook copilots—always with explicit guardrails and observability. Cross‑org influence: You align teams through fitness functions, scorecards, and readiness gates that accelerate—not block—delivery; you communicate tradeoffs crisply to execs and engineers. AI fluency: Curious, adaptable, and proactive in exploring AI that responsibly improves scale outcomes. Nice to Haves Scale scorecard: Company‑wide fitness functions (latency/throughput/error rates) are adopted and reviewed regularly. High‑impact wins: 2–3 bottlenecks removed with documented, reproducible testbeds; pXX latencies and error rates improve on top enterprise workloads; repeat P0s trend down. AI‑assisted scale engineering: AI‑driven anomaly detection reduces alert noise while improving signal; generative load testing and copilot runbooks are used in release/readiness checks for the top critical services; time‑to‑isolate regressions drops 20–30%. Success in 6–12 Months Company‑wide scale scorecard in place; 2–3 high‑impact bottlenecks removed; top enterprise workloads show improved pXX latencies and error rates; fewer repeat P0s. We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process. For jobs or candidates in NYC, certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 3, 2025. Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here 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: $244,000 - $366,000 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 Guideli