infrastructure
Posted Jun 23Principal Engineer, Data Infrastructure
at Klaviyo
Boston, United StatesOn-site
Responsibilities
- Own the technical direction and delivery for Klaviyo's data platform - streaming, batch compute, storage/lakehouse, and governance - now the foundation for autonomous, agent-driven experiences.
- Design and implement core data platform capabilities (e.g., event ingestion/CDC, stream processing, batch orchestration, data lake/warehouse patterns, catalog/lineage, governance, access, and compliance).
- Define and uphold SLOs for data freshness, availability, and correctness; author/run readiness reviews, incident response, and post‑incident learning for your domain.
- Author ADRs/RFCs, land data contracts and schema governance, and standardize connectors and templates that accelerate developer velocity.
- Influence & enablement: You land data contracts, connectors, and templates that speed delivery for producers and consumers; you mentor via design docs and pairing.
Requirements
- Klaviyo's data platform processes billions of events daily across billions of consumer profiles for hundreds of thousands of brands, and increasingly that data is consumed not just by people but by a growing number of AI agents acting on customers' behalf.
- Pair with product teams and analytics/ML to expose the right abstractions and unblock customer value quickly.
- Use AI to streamline data workflows, from authoring and testing pipelines to catalog/search and DQ, so analysts, ML, and product teams move faster with confidence. Who You Are •
- AI fluency (Klaviyo default): You experiment, learn fast, and share AI wins responsibly. Nice to Haves
- AI‑augmented data operations: Semantic discovery and auto‑documentation cover the majority of high‑value datasets; AI‑assisted DQ monitors reduce data incidents on top pipelines by 25–40%; pipeline authoring and review times drop 15–25% with AI in the loop.
Experience
- Experience: 10+ years building and operating distributed data systems (e.g., Kafka/PubSub, Flink/Spark/Beam, Airflow/Dagster, Iceberg/Delta/Hudi; Snowflake/BigQuery; object storage) with multi‑tenant reliability.
Benefits
- 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
- Your recruiter can provide more details about the specific salary/OTE range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
- Base Pay Range For US Locations: $244,000 — $366,000 USD
Contact
- Want to learn more about life at Klaviyo? Visit klaviyo.com/careers to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.
Additional details
- 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.
- The footprint grows on two axes at once, ever‑larger data volumes and a steady stream of new data scenarios (new sources, domains, and consumption patterns) and your systems have to scale on both.
- You'll design and ship systems that are fast, reliable, cost‑efficient, and safe for autonomous access, creating paved roads for data producers and consumers, human and agent alike.
- This is an individual‑contributor role (no direct reports); you lead through architecture, code, and influence.
- Expectations align to Lead/Principal IC behaviors: establishing SLOs, driving technical evolution, and acting as the interface across teams. What You'll Do
- Profile, tune, and right‑size systems for performance and cost; partner with FinOps on unit‑economics guardrails.
- Technical expertise: Data ingestion/CDC, stream processing, batch orchestration, lakehouse patterns, catalog/lineage, governance, and access controls, measured by freshness, availability, and correctness SLOs.
- Adopted paved roads: Producers/consumers are on standard ingestion, processing, and storage paths; schema governance and contracts reduce breakage.