Director of Engineering, Messaging Infrastructure

Klaviyo•Boston, MA

3h•Hybrid

About The Position

Klaviyo powers growth for businesses by helping them reach customers on the right channel at the right moment. As Director of Engineering, Messaging Infrastructure , you will lead the teams that build and operate the core, multi-tenant platform that sends and receives messages at massive scale across email, SMS, mobile push, WhatsApp, and future channels. Your organization will own the services, pipelines, and integrations that ensure messages are delivered fast, reliably, and compliantly—so product teams can innovate confidently and our customers can trust us with their most valuable communications. Success in this role means higher deliverability, lower latency and cost-per-message, stronger privacy & compliance posture, and faster developer velocity across Klaviyo. How You’ll Make a Difference Own the messaging platform end to end (ingestion, orchestration, templating/rendering, scheduling, routing, send, feedback loops, analytics)—with clear SLOs, scalable multi-region architecture, and a measurable reliability posture (e.g., error budgets, MTTR, incident rate). Increase deliverability & throughput by advancing our MTA/SMS provider strategies, queueing and rate-limiting, channel-specific features (e.g., pre-flight checks, warm-up), and feedback processing (bounces, complaints, carrier responses). Harden compliance & safety in partnership with Legal/Privacy (e.g., consent/state management, opt-out, quiet hours, TCPA/CAN‑SPAM/CTIA/GDPR-aware workflows) to protect customers and their end-users. Accelerate developer velocity for channel teams via clear APIs, SDKs, contracts, documentation, and paved-road tooling (test environments, canaries, shadow traffic, feature flags, progressive delivery). Deliver business impact by tying platform choices to measurable outcomes (deliverability %, send latency, success rate, $/MM, cycle time), setting an annual platform strategy and quarterly commitments. Build and scale a high-performing org of managers and senior ICs; raise the talent bar through crisp expectations, transparent feedback, and career growth paths aligned to Klaviyo’s standards. Transform workflows with AI. Put AI at the center of how the org plans, operates, and learns—using it to streamline incident response, speed root-cause analysis, optimize capacity, and improve developer productivity. What You’ll Do Set vision & roadmap: Define a 12–18 month technical strategy for Messaging Infrastructure; translate it into quarterly, outcomes-based plans with clear tradeoffs and risks. Architect for scale & resiliency: Guide design for high-throughput streaming, durable queues, idempotent processing, multi-tenant isolation, and multi-region failover; champion observability-first development. Operational excellence: Establish SLOs and on-call practices; lead major incident reviews with a blameless, action-oriented posture; drive cost efficiency and capacity planning. Partner deeply: Work with Product, Security, Data, and GTM teams to align on customer requirements, roadmaps, and launch readiness; represent the platform in exec forums. Elevate engineering quality: Institutionalize design reviews, threat modeling, test strategies, and change management that reduce cycle time while protecting reliability. Talent & culture: Hire exceptional people, develop managers, and model urgency, ownership, and accountability—rewarding impact and raising the bar on what "good" looks like at scale. Continuously experiment with AI —testing tools, sharing learning, and championing new applications that responsibly accelerate org workflows and elevate quality.

Requirements

Platform-minded leader with a track record building/operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems (messaging, streaming, or analogous high-throughput platforms). You’re hands-on enough to dig into architecture, but you lead through clarity, metrics, and great managers.
Owner of outcomes. You connect engineering choices to business results—deliverability, latency, reliability, developer velocity, and cost—and hold teams accountable for moving those numbers.
High-intensity, high-urgency operator who thrives in ambiguity, makes crisp tradeoffs, and ships ambitious, reliable systems on a predictable cadence.
Inclusive people leader experienced in growing managers and senior ICs, building healthy on-call cultures, and scaling organizations across hubs.
Strong partner & communicator who can translate complex systems into simple narratives for executives, customers, and cross-functional peers.
AI-fluent builder. You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are excited to learn fast and responsibly integrate AI into everyday workflows.

Nice To Haves

Domain experience with email MTAs, SMS aggregators/carrier networks, push services, or deliverability tooling.
Prior leadership of multi-region or hybrid-cloud systems, and experience setting SLOs/error budgets at platform boundaries.
Background in privacy-aware systems (e.g., consent orchestration, data residency, data retention/TTL strategies).
Experience improving developer experience (APIs/SDKs, golden paths, internal platforms) for 10+ product teams.

Responsibilities

Own the messaging platform end to end (ingestion, orchestration, templating/rendering, scheduling, routing, send, feedback loops, analytics)—with clear SLOs, scalable multi-region architecture, and a measurable reliability posture (e.g., error budgets, MTTR, incident rate).
Increase deliverability & throughput by advancing our MTA/SMS provider strategies, queueing and rate-limiting, channel-specific features (e.g., pre-flight checks, warm-up), and feedback processing (bounces, complaints, carrier responses).
Harden compliance & safety in partnership with Legal/Privacy (e.g., consent/state management, opt-out, quiet hours, TCPA/CAN‑SPAM/CTIA/GDPR-aware workflows) to protect customers and their end-users.
Accelerate developer velocity for channel teams via clear APIs, SDKs, contracts, documentation, and paved-road tooling (test environments, canaries, shadow traffic, feature flags, progressive delivery).
Deliver business impact by tying platform choices to measurable outcomes (deliverability %, send latency, success rate, $/MM, cycle time), setting an annual platform strategy and quarterly commitments.
Build and scale a high-performing org of managers and senior ICs; raise the talent bar through crisp expectations, transparent feedback, and career growth paths aligned to Klaviyo’s standards.
Transform workflows with AI. Put AI at the center of how the org plans, operates, and learns—using it to streamline incident response, speed root-cause analysis, optimize capacity, and improve developer productivity.
Set vision & roadmap: Define a 12–18 month technical strategy for Messaging Infrastructure; translate it into quarterly, outcomes-based plans with clear tradeoffs and risks.
Architect for scale & resiliency: Guide design for high-throughput streaming, durable queues, idempotent processing, multi-tenant isolation, and multi-region failover; champion observability-first development.
Operational excellence: Establish SLOs and on-call practices; lead major incident reviews with a blameless, action-oriented posture; drive cost efficiency and capacity planning.
Partner deeply: Work with Product, Security, Data, and GTM teams to align on customer requirements, roadmaps, and launch readiness; represent the platform in exec forums.
Elevate engineering quality: Institutionalize design reviews, threat modeling, test strategies, and change management that reduce cycle time while protecting reliability.
Talent & culture: Hire exceptional people, develop managers, and model urgency, ownership, and accountability—rewarding impact and raising the bar on what "good" looks like at scale.
Continuously experiment with AI —testing tools, sharing learning, and championing new applications that responsibly accelerate org workflows and elevate quality.