Principal Engineer, Enterprise Scalability (Remote - East Coast Only)

Klaviyo • Boston, MA

1d • $244,000 - $366,000 • Remote

About The Position

Klaviyo is seeking a senior individual-contributor technical leader to own the company’s approach to enterprise scalability, performance, reliability, and multi-region readiness. The role reports to a VP of Engineering and has no direct reports. It works across teams to identify and remove major bottlenecks, drive platform-wide architectural improvements, and define measurable readiness for the largest tenants and most demanding workloads.

The work spans system design, profiling, hands-on implementation, and production rollout. The engineer will establish shared measures and expectations for scale, partner with service owners to validate improvements, create repeatable tools and patterns, and build scalability and reliability practices into engineering delivery. The role also applies AI-assisted techniques to engineering investigations and incident response, with explicit guardrails and measurement of operational impact.

The position is remote and limited to the East Coast. It may require up to 10% travel, coordinated in advance. The stated U.S. base salary range is $244,000–$366,000. Total compensation may also include an annual cash bonus, equity, sign-on payments, and eligible health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits.

Requirements

• 12 or more years of relevant engineering experience, including deep experience scaling multi-tenant SaaS and a track record of removing significant bottlenecks with measurable production impact.
• Hands-on expertise in performance engineering, capacity planning, sharding and partitioning, caching, back-pressure, tenant isolation, multi-region architectures, and large-scale migrations.
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar systems, test hypotheses, write production code, and work with service owners to roll out changes safely.
• Sound technical judgment in weighing architectural tradeoffs and balancing immediate constraints with broader platform investments.
• Ability to align teams across organizational boundaries, clarify ownership, and establish practical engineering standards.
• Clear communication of complex technical decisions and their business implications to engineering and executive audiences.
• Practical experience applying AI tools or automation to engineering work, with the ability to assess usefulness, limitations, and operational risks.

Responsibilities

• Define scale readiness through measurable latency, throughput, error-rate, and capacity targets; establish a shared scorecard and align teams on service-level objectives, error budgets, and performance expectations.
• Use production data, profiling, and reproducible benchmarks to identify significant constraints, partner with service owners on fixes, and verify improvements under representative workloads.
• Design and implement architectural strategies including sharding, partitioning, caching, back-pressure, and workload isolation.
• Advance multi-region readiness and develop safe approaches for high-volume data migrations.
• Create reusable benchmarks, profiling harnesses, and test environments, and help engineers turn successful fixes into repeatable patterns.
• Lead scalability reviews and establish proportionate release gates that surface risks early.
• Lead technical incident deep dives, identify systemic causes, and work with teams to deliver and validate lasting fixes.
• Apply AI-assisted profiling, workload modeling, synthetic traffic, anomaly detection, and guided runbooks; establish guardrails and measure operational impact.
• Communicate priorities, tradeoffs, and outcomes to engineering and executive audiences, connecting technical investments to customer experience, enterprise growth, and operating efficiency.

Benefits

• Potential participation in the company’s annual cash bonus plan.
• Equity may be included in total compensation.
• Sign-on payments may be included in total compensation.
• A comprehensive range of health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits based on eligibility.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed