Senior Lead Software Engineer - Developer Infrastructure

Klaviyo•Boston, MA

About The Position

Klaviyo is a leading marketing automation platform that helps businesses grow by delivering personalized experiences. Our mission is to empower creators to own their destiny. We believe in providing an exceptional developer experience that enables our engineering teams to build and ship high-quality software efficiently and with confidence. The Developer Infrastructure team at Klaviyo is at the heart of our engineering organization, dedicated to accelerating Klaviyo development. We build and maintain the tools and processes that allow engineers to maximize their focus on business objectives by minimizing time spent on build and deployment systems, foundational software "building blocks," and development environments. We are committed to fostering open communication and collaboration with our internal customers – the engineers. As a Senior Lead Software Engineer within the Dev Infrastructure pillar, you will serve as the primary technical architect for our Dependencies and Platform domain while driving the overarching technical vision for the entire Dev Infra group. You will partner with leaders across CI/CD, Web Platform, Environments, Quality Tools & Testing and AI Enablement to ensure a cohesive infrastructure strategy, acting as a key technical liaison to the broader Core Infra organization. Your leadership will ensure that our core systems, dependency lifecycles, and platform upgrades are not just maintained, but architected to accelerate engineering velocity across the entire company. As a Senior Lead Software Engineer, you will have an overarching responsibility for the architecture, health, and dependencies for the Klaviyo code base with a focus on the backend.

Requirements

12 years of experience in software development, strong knowledge of computer science fundamentals, domain-driven design, and extensive expertise in architectural patterns, specifically within the domain of distributed systems.
BA or BS Degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent experience.
Technical Expertise: Deep expertise in relevant programming languages (e.g., Go, Python) and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containerization (Kubernetes, Docker), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
Technical Strategy: Demonstrated experience in contributing to the product and platform vision, as well as defining the strategy within the broader scope of long-term organizational needs.
Architectural Skills: Strong understanding of software architecture, design patterns, and system integration, with the ability to define technical strategies and influence architectural decisions across multiple teams.
Soft Skills: Exceptional problem-solving, analytical, leadership, and communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
AI Enthusiast: You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects, and you’re excited to dive in and learn fast. You’re hungry to responsibly explore new AI tools and workflows, finding ways to make your work smarter and more efficient.

Nice To Haves

Experience with specific tools such as Pants, FastAPI, Django, React, Terraform, Buildkite.
Background in performance optimization
Familiarity with complex data management for testing, including large datasets and production-like data replication.

Responsibilities

Technical Strategy: Define technical strategy within the scope of the Klaviyo backend and execute to improve the area's architecture, products, infrastructure, and processes.
Strategic Planning and Architecture: Define the technical vision and architectural roadmap for the platform, ensuring all upgrades and dependency management align with long-term business goals for scalability, reliability, and security.
Dependency Management: Lead efforts to determine, analyze, and optimize backend and third-party dependencies, ensuring they are secure, performant, and reliable. This includes establishing frameworks for risk assessment and contingency planning related to dependencies.
Platform Upgrades and Rollouts: Oversee and assist with the planning and seamless rollout of major software releases and updates, managing the entire lifecycle from design to deployment in production environments including significant individual contributions.
Enhance Developer Productivity: Drive initiatives to improve platform cycle time metrics across the board, including PR CI Speed, Human Code Review Pickup Time, and Commit Velocity by Repo. This involves a relentless focus on reducing toil and increasing engineering efficiency.
Mentorship: Mentor other engineers regularly, primarily experienced lead and senior engineers. Ensure others in the area are developing skills they need to improve within the organization.
Problem Solving and Reliability: Act as a go-to expert for diagnosing and resolving complex performance, scalability, and reliability issues across the platform. Implement proactive monitoring and telemetry to identify and address problems before they become critical incidents.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with product managers, security teams, hardware engineers, and other stakeholders to gather requirements, resolve conflicts, and ensure alignment across all teams and projects.
Continuous Improvement: Stay current with emerging technologies and industry trends, evaluating new tools and practices to identify how they can improve systems and internal processes.

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