Senior Engineering Manager, Applied AI (Customer Agent)

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. 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 frameworks as a quality gate, guardrails, and failure handling on non-deterministic output. 8+ years in software engineering building software products and 4+ years managing engineering teams, with clear communication across technical and business audiences. Credibility comes from the work itself, not just org-chart authority: you're still hands-on enough to write and ship code, debug production issues, and make architecture calls yourself. Genuinely enjoy developing people and building a team: hiring, leveling, coaching, and giving direct feedback aren't a chore for you, they're a core part of the job you want. Possess a deep, practical mastery of engineering architectures required to build and maintain highly scalable systems in production. Proven track record of leading and shipping complex, multi-quarter initiatives that require tight coordination across multiple engineering teams. Comfortable owning the hard parts of people management: conducting performance reviews and mentoring engineers at all career levels with investment and empathy. Nice to Haves: Experience running a multi-tenant agent platform at production scale, where external customers configure their own agent behavior on shared infrastructure. A track record of turning a single-team tool into shared infrastructure that other teams build on. Experience mentoring engineering managers or leads, not just individual contributors. Boston, MA - In-Office Role - 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: $216,000 - $324,000 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 experienc