Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise Scalability

United States·Bostonlead

OtherSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering

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Quick Summary

Key Responsibilities

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 d

Technical Tools

OtherSoftware EngineerSoftware Engineering

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.

Responsibilities

~1 min read

→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.

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 Have

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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%.

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.

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What We Offer

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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.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Our company takes the security and privacy of job applicants very seriously. We will never ask for payment, bank details, or personal financial information as part of the application process. All our legitimate job postings can be found on our official career site. Please be cautious of job offers that come from non-company email addresses (@klaviyo.com), instant messaging platforms, or unsolicited calls.

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