Lead Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

The mission of the Platform Engineering team is to provide the infrastructure primitives, platforms, tooling, and guidance that let every engineering team at Klaviyo build, ship, and operate with confidence. As a Lead Software Engineer on the Platform Engineering team, you will set technical direction for our core platform services, ensuring our platform primitives scale with Klaviyo’s growth while remaining simple, reliable, and cost-efficient for the teams that depend on them.

What You Will Do

You will build a deep understanding of engineering needs across the organization, guiding the design and development of the right platform primitives (infrastructure, databases, queuing, and more) and balancing the platform's vision with the practical needs of product teams. You will set the technical vision and long-term roadmap for core platform services, translating organizational priorities into a clear, multi-year plan.

Why It Might Be a Fit

You will own the design, development, and evolution of foundational platform primitives that product teams rely on to ship quickly and safely. You will lead cross-team initiatives that improve the availability, scalability, latency, and cost-efficiency of Klaviyo’s core platforms, and drive adoption of the resulting paved paths.

Requirements

• BA or BS degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, with a track record of technical leadership
• Deep, hands-on experience developing production software in Python and/or Go
• Extensive experience working in cloud-native environments, with hands-on ownership of infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform) and containerized platforms (e.g. Kubernetes)
• Fundamental understanding of Linux and all layers of the networking stack; comfortable administering and debugging production systems
• Experience across a range of platform-related domains such as API gateways & traffic management, observability, asynchronous processing, or database/storage platforms
• Proven ability to independently own the full lifecycle of complex, cross-team platform initiatives — from discovery and technical design through rollout and long-term maintenance
• Strong track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team

Benefits

• Participation in the company’s annual cash bonus plan
• Variable compensation (OTE) for sales and customer success roles
• Equity
• Sign-on payments
• Comprehensive range of health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits based on eligibility