Engineering Manager, Customer Agent

About the Role

Join Klaviyo as an Engineering Manager, Customer Agent, and lead the team building Customer Agent, a conversational AI system designed to enable brands to interact with their customers at unprecedented scale. This role is central to Klaviyo’s vision for AI-powered customer engagement, delivering real-time, contextually aware conversations to help brands support, convert, and retain millions of consumers. We are seeking a leader with deep experience in building and scaling agentic systems and AI-enabled products to shape how Customer Agent evolves into a highly extensible and reliable platform. You will be instrumental in setting technical direction, developing and growing the team, driving foundational architectural decisions, and keeping pace with rapid advancements in the AI ecosystem. While a leadership role, strong hands-on engineering experience and engagement with complex technical problems are highly valued. You will own the team’s mission, strategy, and roadmap, working closely with leaders across engineering, product, data science, and go-to-market functions to define requirements, set priorities, and measure success. You will guide system design, ensure platform reliability, and deliver features that significantly improve customer conversations and outcomes, including leading teams that apply machine learning models and LLM-based APIs to create adaptive and personalized conversational agents.

How You Will Make a Difference

• Lead and manage a team of full-stack and AI engineers, directly managing some workstreams.
• Collaborate on project planning, define achievements, identify dependencies, and ensure business goals are met.
• Actively participate in interviewing, hiring, and team leveling.
• Develop SMART goals and career development plans for direct reports.
• Develop and execute technical strategies aligned with Klaviyo's business goals, ensuring exceptional products and a reliable, user-friendly AI systems roadmap.
• Engage with internal and external stakeholders to understand needs, resolve blockers, manage expectations, and translate customer needs into valuable AI-driven roadmaps and solutions.
• Advise the team on modeling, system design, experimental design, and implementation decisions.
• Improve engineering-wide processes such as recruiting, performance development, communication, and agile development.
• Stay current with emerging AI trends and technologies, identifying and leveraging opportunities within Klaviyo’s ecosystem.

Who You Are

• Experience building AI-driven product features in a full-stack capacity and leading teams who have built scaled systems.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with 2+ years of experience managing engineering teams, including remote members and lead engineers.
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of collaborating with diverse stakeholders to translate business/product roadmaps into AI-driven technical roadmaps and solutions that add significant customer and business value.
• Motivated to grow the team through developing current members and attracting new talent to expand capabilities.
• Eager to engage with code, understand the product area, and provide applicable technical mentorship.
• In-depth understanding of common engineering architectures for highly scalable systems.
• Proven ability to lead and deliver complex, multi-quarter projects involving at least two teams.
• Comfortable conducting performance reviews and mentoring team members at all levels.

Bonus Points

• Experience as an entrepreneur.