Staff Engineer, Applied AI (Customer Agent)

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Our Engineering team builds the AI systems that power how brands run their businesses on Klaviyo. We move fast ship in production and hold a high bar for what AI-native actually means: systems that make real judgment calls not demos.

The Customer Agent team is one of the newest and most ambitious groups in that org based in Boston and working in-office: were building a conversational AI system that lets brands serve their own customers at a scale no human support team could match. Were still small enough that one engineers work visibly shapes how the whole platform evolves. Were past the demo stage: the team ships changes against live customer traffic measures quality with real evaluation frameworks and treats reliability as a product feature not an afterthought.

As a Staff Engineer youll set the technical and product direction for a core area of Customer Agent end to end building a 0-to-1 agentic product with the speed and ownership of a startup backed by the scale and resources of one of the most innovative tech companies on the East Coast while staying hands-on with the hardest problems yourself. This is a lead-level role with a wide footprint across our agentic product - from orchestration to governance - that grows based on where the product is when you join. Were looking for an engineer who owns complex ambiguous problems who has built scaled and supported a production agentic system through everything that comes after the demo and who up-levels the people process and technology around them.

• Set the technical and product direction for a core area of Customer Agent from architecture through production and contribute to the direction of the platform overall.
• Take on the hardest technical problems in your area: orchestration evaluation guardrails memory & context failure handling for non-deterministic systems.
• Write and ship code review designs and make the hard calls in your area when theres no obvious right answer.
• Define patterns that other engineers adopt and mentor through design reviews rather than direct management.
• Partner with product design data science and go-to-market leaders to shape what gets built not just how its built.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and bring the ones worth betting on into production.

• Youve built scaled and supported production agentic systems not just prototyped them: real orchestration evals guardrails and non-deterministic failure handling. Youve owned your part of one through launch incidents and the operational reality after the demo.
• Youve learned the hard lessons that only come from running agents in production: securing them against misuse and abuse and the operational scar tissue of keeping a non-deterministic system reliable as usage grows.
• Youve owned technical and product direction for a significant area before not just your own component and you can point to something you designed and championed that shipped and that other engineers built on.
• Youre hands-on: writing code reviewing your own and others architecture decisions and debugging production issues yourself not delegating the hardest problems away.
• Your patterns and designs are reused by other engineers and youve unblocked many others projects not just your own.
• You communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly across engineering and product audiences and you can turn an undefined problem into a plan others rally behind.

• Experience working on a multi-tenant agent platform at production scale where external customers configure their own agent behavior on shared infrastructure.
• Experience building 0-to-1 products or working in startup environments.
• A track record with production evaluation systems AI observability or human-in-the-loop workflows for LLM-powered products.

Boston MA - In-Office Role