AI Engineer II
Klaviyo
$116,000 - $174,000 / year
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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.
AI Engineer, Customer Agent
About the Role
At Klaviyo, we believe the future of software lies not only in tools that help people work more efficiently, but in intelligent systems that can take action, learn from outcomes, and improve customer experiences over time.
Klaviyo serves more than 167,000 customers and processes billions of consumer profiles, messages, interactions, and conversion signals. This creates a unique opportunity to build state-of-the-art AI systems that help businesses create and execute better customer experiences at scale.
We’re looking for an AI Engineer to join the Customer Agent team, Klaviyo’s AI-native conversational platform. You’ll help build scalable backend systems and AI-powered product experiences that enable agents to retrieve context, use tools, and take reliable action on behalf of customers.
This is a backend-heavy role with opportunities to contribute to user-facing experiences. You’ll independently own meaningful pieces of larger systems, contribute to technical decisions, and continue developing your depth across backend engineering, applied AI, and production reliability.
How You Will Make a Difference
- Build and improve reliable backend systems and APIs that power AI-driven customer experiences.
- Develop production agentic features involving tool use, context management, retrieval, structured outputs, orchestration, and multi-step workflows.
- Contribute to solving applied AI problems across retrieval and RAG, grounding, hallucination mitigation, model selection, and choosing between LLM-based, deterministic, or hybrid approaches.
- Build and use evaluation approaches including representative datasets, automated and human evaluation, regression testing, qualitative error analysis, and production signals.
- Improve system reliability through guardrails, retries, fallbacks, observability, monitoring, and thoughtful failure handling.
- Build asynchronous and distributed processing workflows that support AI workloads at scale.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and help diagnose, mitigate, and learn from production incidents.
- Work with external customers and cross-functional partners to understand workflows, identify pain points, and translate feedback into product improvements.
- Monitor shipped experiences and use quality metrics, system performance, and customer feedback to guide iteration.
Who You Are
- You have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with experience building backend systems or distributed applications.
- You have hands-on experience building or contributing to generative AI or agentic AI applications, ideally used by real users or in production environments.
- You are proficient in Python and have experience with modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.
- You have experience with asynchronous processing or distributed task/event systems such as Celery, Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or Redis.
- You have working knowledge of databases, data modeling, APIs, and persistence patterns used in production systems.
- You are comfortable working in cloud environments and have experience with technologies such as AWS, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, or CI/CD systems.
- You can reason about tradeoffs among quality, latency, cost, reliability, and implementation complexity, and know when to seek additional technical context.
- You are comfortable working through ambiguity, breaking larger problems into smaller pieces, and making progress without every requirement being fully specified.
- You have experience with, or strong interest in, working directly with external customers to understand problems and improve products.
- You care about shipping useful, reliable products and are motivated to deepen your engineering judgment in a rapidly evolving technical space.
Nice to Have
- Experience training, fine-tuning, distilling, or otherwise adapting machine learning or language models.
- Experience with reinforcement learning or feedback-driven optimization.
- Experience with evaluation infrastructure such as LLM-as-judge systems, evaluator calibration, benchmark datasets, or AI quality tooling.
- Experience operating AI systems at meaningful production scale or optimizing inference cost, latency, or throughput.
#indeedRD
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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.
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 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.
Klaviyo 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.
Benefits
- stock options
About this role
Klaviyo is building conversational AI systems that help businesses manage customer interactions at scale, and they're looking for a backend engineer to develop the infrastructure behind these agentic experiences. You'd own meaningful pieces of their Customer Agent platform—building reliable APIs, implementing AI-powered features like tool use and context retrieval, and solving applied problems around retrieval-augmented generation, hallucination mitigation, and production reliability. This is fundamentally a backend role with Python and modern frameworks like FastAPI, but it sits at the intersection of distributed systems engineering and generative AI, so you'd also contribute to product experiences and work directly with customers to understand their workflows.
The role suits someone with at least three years of backend or distributed systems experience who has hands-on exposure to generative or agentic AI in real-world settings. You'll need solid proficiency in Python, familiarity with asynchronous processing systems like Celery or Kafka, and comfort operating in cloud environments. Beyond the core requirements, experience with model adaptation, reinforcement learning, or AI evaluation infrastructure would strengthen your candidacy, though those aren't mandatory. You'd participate in on-call rotations and help diagnose production incidents, so reliability and observability matter here.
Based in Boston with hybrid flexibility, the position offers a base salary of $116,000 to $174,000 depending on experience and location, plus equity and benefits. This is a good fit if you're a backend engineer looking to deepen your work in AI systems without abandoning the engineering fundamentals you've built.
How this employer is doing
caution
- News: Recently Raised Funding
- H1B: Sponsors Visas
- Layoffs in News
- Recent Acquisition
In the news
Boston-based tech company Klaviyo announces layoffs, NBC Boston
This role's local market on JobMinglr
Pay for this role
$116,000 to $174,000 per year
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