Director of Engineering, Production 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 careers.klaviyo.com to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.
Klaviyo’s mission is to help businesses own their growth. To do that at scale, our engineers need rock‑solid platform primitives, clear, reliable building blocks that make it simple to run, store, observe, and ship in production. As Director, Production Infrastructure you will lead and build a product‑quality platform that accelerates every R&D team’s path from idea to customer value. You and your team will define what is (and isn’t) a platform primitive, set strong ownership boundaries, and deliver “golden paths” that answer questions like: “I want to run X- where do I run it?”, “My product needs a single table to store a bit of data, where should I put it?”, and “How do I get data from my service to the frontend?”
This is a hands‑on, execution‑first leadership role for a platform‑minded builder who measures success in developer velocity, system reliability, and business impact.
What You’ll Do
- Own the Production Infrastructure charter. Define the platform primitives Klaviyo provides (compute runtimes, data storage options, messaging/eventing, service networking, observability) and the clear “contract” for each: APIs, SLIs/SLOs, support model, and runbooks ensuring consistency with our company wide operational excellence best practices
- Publish golden paths and decision trees that make default choices obvious (e.g., “run X here,” “store a bit here,” “expose data to frontend via Y”), minimizing one‑off work and increasing self‑service.
- Raise reliability and safety bars across production: incident prevention and response (blameless postmortems, on‑call health), change management, capacity planning, and resilient multi‑tenant patterns.
- Accelerate developer velocity by improving time‑to‑first‑service, deployment lead time, and mean time to recovery; partner with product teams to remove infrastructure bottlenecks and reduce cognitive load.
- Engineer for cost‑effectiveness at scale. Establish clear cost guardrails, usage quotas, and right‑sizing policies; partner with Finance and Security to balance spend, risk, and speed.
- Lead and grow high‑performing teams of managers and senior ICs; set crisp goals, coach for impact, and cultivate an inclusive, ownership‑driven culture.
- Partner cross‑functionally with engineering leaders, security, and others to sequence investments, clarify ownership boundaries, and land platform changes safely.
- Measure what matters. Define and report a concise scorecard (e.g., SLO coverage, incident frequency/severity, lead time for changes, MTTR, developer NPS for platform, infra cost‑to‑serve).
- Transform workflows by putting AI at the center, building smarter systems and ways of working from the ground up; continuously experiment with AI tools and share learnings to keep the org ahead of the curve.
Who You Are
- Platform‑minded, execution‑oriented leader with a track record building and operating production platforms at scale (e.g., multi‑tenant compute, storage, networking, CI/CD, observability). You prioritize measurable outcomes such as:reliability, efficiency, and developer productivity.
- Experienced people leader: 10+ years in infrastructure/SRE/platform engineering, including 5+ years managing managers and senior ICs; you set high bars, coach well, and build inclusive teams.
- Reliability first. Deep familiarity with SRE practices, SLO/SLI design, incident management, capacity planning, and operational readiness. (
- Great system thinker & communicator. You reduce ambiguity, create clarity in docs and diagrams, and influence across product, data, and security to land org‑wide changes.
- Outcome‑driven and accountable. You set crisp goals, instrument the work, and hold teams to impact not just activity. You’re comfortable saying “no” and narrowing scope to ship.
- AI‑curious and hands‑on. You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are eager to learn fast, using AI responsibly to make your team’s work smarter and more efficient.
- Technical stack familiarity (mix of): public cloud (AWS/GCP), container orchestration, service meshes/ingress, data stores (SQL/NoSQL/object), eventing/streaming, IaC, and modern observability.
Nice to Haves
- Experience productizing internal platforms (treating infra as a product with SLAs, roadmaps, and developer experience metrics).
- Background in data or event‑driven architectures at scale; prior partnership with a centralized data platform (e.g., KDP) to define clean ownership boundaries.
- Prior success improving cost‑to‑serve and reliability in a high‑growth SaaS environment.
We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process. For jobs or candidates in NYC, certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using Covey Scout for Inbound on April 3, 2025.
Please see the independent bias audit report covering our use of Covey here
Massachusetts Applicants:
It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.
Our salary range reflects the cost of labor across various U.S. geographic markets. The range displayed below reflects the minimum and maximum target salaries for the position across all our US locations. The base salary offered for this position is determined by several factors, including the applicant’s job-related skills, relevant experience, education or training, and work location.
In addition to base salary, our total compensation package may include participation in the company’s annual cash bonus plan, variable compensation (OTE) for sales and customer success roles, equity, sign-on payments, and a comprehensive range of health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits based on eligibility.
Your recruiter can provide more details about the specific salary/OTE range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
Get to Know Klaviyo
We’re Klaviyo (pronounced clay-vee-oh). We empower creators to own their destiny by making first-party data accessible and actionable like never before. We see limitless potential for the technology we’re developing to nurture personalized experiences in ecommerce and beyond. To reach our goals, we need our own crew of remarkable creators—ambitious and collaborative teammates who stay focused on our north star: delighting our customers. If you’re ready to do the best work of your career, where you’ll be welcomed as your whole self from day one and supported with generous benefits, we hope you’ll join us.
AI fluency at Klaviyo includes responsible use of AI (including privacy, security, bias awareness, and human-in-the-loop). We provide accommodations as needed.
By participating in Klaviyo’s interview process, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and will adhere to our Guidelines for using AI in the Klaviyo interview Process. For more information about how we process your personal data, see our Job Applicant Privacy Notice.
Klaviyo is committed to a policy of equal opportunity and non-discrimination. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, citizenship, national origin, color, religion or religious creed, age, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, veteran or active military status, marital status, criminal record, genetics, retaliation, sexual harassment or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.