Director of Engineering, Messaging Infrastructure

At Klaviyo, we value the unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives each Klaviyo (we call ourselves Klaviyos) brings to our workplace each and every day. We believe everyone deserves a fair shot at success and appreciate the experiences each person brings beyond the traditional job requirements. If you’re a close but not exact match with the description, we hope you’ll still consider applying. Want to learn more about life at Klaviyo? Visit klaviyo.com/careers to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny. 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 ... (truncated, view full listing at source)