Sr. Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)

About the Team

Our 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.

The Customer Agent team is one of the newest and most ambitious groups in that org, based in Boston and working in-office. We are building a conversational AI system that lets brands serve their own customers at scale. The team ships changes against live customer traffic, measures quality with real evaluation frameworks, and treats reliability as a core product feature.

About the Role

As Senior Staff Engineer, you'll set technical and product direction for Customer Agent end to end, building a 0-to-1 agentic product while staying hands-on with the hardest problems yourself. This is a principal-caliber individual contributor role for an engineer who has personally architected, built, scaled, and supported a production agentic system through everything that comes after the demo.

How You'll Make an Impact

• Set the technical and product direction for Customer Agent's core platform, from architecture through production.
• Personally take on the platform's hardest technical problems: orchestration, evaluation, guardrails, memory & context, self-healing/improving, and failure handling for non-deterministic systems.
• Write and ship code, review designs, and make high-impact technical calls.
• Build architecture and frameworks adopted by other engineers and teams, mentoring through design reviews.
• Partner with product, design, data science, and go-to-market leaders to shape the roadmap.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and bring the ones worth betting on into production.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience architecting, building, scaling, and supporting a production agentic system end to end (real orchestration, evals, guardrails, and non-deterministic failure handling) through launch, scale, incidents, and operational reality.
• Operational experience running agents in production: securing them against misuse and abuse, and keeping non-deterministic systems reliable.
• Proven track record setting technical and product direction across an entire product area.
• Hands-on technical involvement: writing code, reviewing architectural decisions, and debugging production issues.
• Experience designing architecture and frameworks that are reused by other teams.
• Strong communication skills to articulate complex technical trade-offs across engineering, product, and executive audiences.

Nice to Haves

• Experience running a multi-tenant agent platform at production scale with configurable agent behavior on shared infrastructure.
• Experience building 0-to-1 products or working in startup environments.
• Track record with production evaluation systems, AI observability, or human-in-the-loop workflows for LLM-powered products.

Additional Details

• Role is based in-office in Boston, MA.
• May require up to 10% travel for onboarding, meetings, and events.