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.
Why You Should Join the Environments Team
Join our mission to revolutionize developer velocity by removing the friction of infrastructure management. As the Lead Software Engineer for the Environments team, you will be a hands-on technical leader responsible for the tools and systems that allow our engineers to spin up fully provisioned, short-lived environments instantly. You will bridge the gap between local development and production-scale testing, ensuring that our 'reproducible anywhere' philosophy translates into high-quality code delivery. From refining local workflows to scaling our ephemeral environment platform, you will design, code, and ship the foundational systems that empower every engineer at the company to test and deploy with confidence.
What You'll Achieve: Key Responsibilities
You will be the primary technical driver behind our environment strategy, focusing on making "production-parity" accessible to every engineer:
- Technical Leadership: Act as the Lead Individual Contributor (IC) and subject matter expert for environment orchestration, mentoring other engineers and championing a culture of seamless, on-demand testing.
- Architecture & Scalability: Lead the design and evolution of our existing platform to support complex, multi-service architectures, ensuring environments are isolated, secure, and performant.
- Abstract Complexity: Productize our internal infrastructure by architecting self-service tools that automate the heavy lifting of service provisioning. You will eliminate manual setup and 'it works on my machine' hurdles, enabling developers to focus their energy on building world-class application logic and UX.
- Drive Reproducibility: Future-proof the platform by exploring "reproducible anywhere" capabilities, enabling these short-lived environments to run seamlessly across cloud providers and local development setups.
- Optimize E2E & Manual Testing: Partner with QA and Product teams to ensure ephemeral environments are the gold standard for end-to-end testing and stakeholder reviews.
- Operational Excellence: Define standards for environment lifecycle management, including automated cleanup (reaping), cost-tracking, and observability for transient infrastructure.
- Hot Start & High Impact: This project already exists and has momentum. Your first 90 days will involve taking the reins of a functional system and identifying the architectural leaps needed to bring it into the future.
- Shape the Future of DevEx: You will define how a rapidly growing engineering organization interacts with infrastructure. You aren't just managing servers; you are building a product where the "customers" are your fellow engineers.
- Ownership and Ambition: As a Lead IC, you have significant autonomy to choose the right tools and patterns. You’ll solve complex problems like data sanitization for test environments and service mesh routing that directly impact company-wide velocity.
Who You Are:
- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a recent focus on Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, or Full-Stack Development.
- Architectural Visionary: You have a proven track record of leading large-scale technical projects as an individual contributor, navigating complexity without needing a management title.
- Architectural Visionary & Lead Individual Contributor: You have a proven track record of leading large-scale technical projects. You are a "Lead by doing" engineer who prefers to be in the IDE, navigating complexity through direct implementation rather than just management.
- Full-Stack Practitioner: You are a hands-on expert across the stack. You can build intuitive, self-service interfaces in React and TypeScript just as effectively as you develop robust, scalable backend services in Python/Django.
- Cloud & Orchestration Expert: Deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, and the AWS ecosystem (EC2, RDS, Networking).
- Internal Product Mindset: You treat your platform as a product. You are obsessed with making it easy for other engineering teams to onboard their specific products and services into our environments with minimal manual configuration.
- AI Enthusiast: You are excited about using AI to accelerate the SDLC. You see ephemeral environments as the key to unlocking automated AI testing and faster time-to-completion for features.
- 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.
- Quality & Testing Mindset: You understand the nuances of E2E testing and how high-fidelity environments are the secret ingredient to preventing production regressions.
Technologies we use (not exhaustive):
- Backend: Python, Django, Celery, Go
- Infrastructure: AWS (EKS, RDS, Aurora), Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm
- Data & Messaging: MySQL, Redis, Pulsar, Kafka
- AI Tools: Integration with Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or internal AI enablement frameworks
- Frontend: React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
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.
Top Skills
Klaviyo Boston, Massachusetts, USA Office
We're in the heart of the Financial district with easy access to public transportation and a short walk from South Station. We also have hubs in Denver, London and Sydney.
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