Director of Engineering - Growth & Engagement

Director of Engineering – Growth & Engagement

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's mission is to help businesses own their growth. As the Director, Engineering – Growth & Engagement, you will lead a portfolio of product engineering teams that sit directly on the customer journey: how customers are acquired, how they get to value, and how they experience Klaviyo-powered commerce on site.

This role will lead three teams with distinct but connected charters. K-Social turns social conversations, content, and engagement into structured, actionable data that enriches the Klaviyo profile and unlocks new marketing value. Growth owns onboarding, activation from free to paid, and cross-sell across our product-led growth motion. Customer Hub powers a personalized onsite account experience that brings together merchandising, support, offers, and self-service in one seamless destination.

You'll lead an org of roughly 30+ engineers across these areas, including multiple people leaders, and partner closely with Product, Design, Data, GTM, and Support. This is a Director-level role for a product-minded, AI-first engineering leader who can connect strategy to execution, build a strong experimentation culture, and raise the bar on customer-facing product quality.

What You'll Do

• Own the engineering strategy, execution, and operating cadence across K-Social, Growth, and Customer Hub, ensuring each team's roadmap ladders into Klaviyo's broader growth strategy.
• Lead the engineering evolution of K-Social, connecting social engagement to the Klaviyo customer profile and building the technical foundation for products like Social Auto-Replies, engagement intelligence, retargeting ads, and content activation.
• Drive the Growth portfolio across onboarding, free-to-paid activation, and cross-sell, building systems and team habits that improve conversion, shorten time-to-value, and create measurable business impact.
• Shape Customer Hub into a best-in-class personalized onsite experience that encourages signed-in shopping, delivers proactive support, surfaces recommendations and offers, and makes self-service account management intuitive and useful.
• Build a high-velocity experimentation culture across the portfolio, including the instrumentation, frameworks, and decision-making rigor needed to run rapid tests and learn quickly.
• Partner deeply with Product, Design, Data, Marketing, Support, and other engineering leaders to turn ambiguous opportunities into clear priorities, scoped plans, and shipped outcomes.
• Raise the bar on frontend quality, product polish, performance, and reliability across customer-facing surfaces so teams can move fast without compromising craft.
• Balance near-term delivery with longer-term investments in experimentation infrastructure, identity/profile foundations, personalization capabilities, and product architecture.
• Define and operate against a clear scorecard for the portfolio, with metrics such as social profile capture, activation rate, free-to-paid conversion, experiment velocity, cross-sell attach, signed-in engagement, self-service completion, and product adoption.
• Build and develop a strong leadership bench by coaching managers and senior engineers, clarifying ownership, and creating an inclusive environment where teams can do the best work of their careers.
• Bring an AI-first mindset to both the product and the organization, identifying where AI can improve personalization, accelerate experimentation, strengthen support experiences, and help teams make better decisions faster.
• Continuously experiment with AI tools—testing, learning, and sharing insights to keep the team and organization ahead of the curve, as well as championing new applications that accelerate workflows and elevate quality responsibly.

Who You Are

• You have 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant experience leading multiple product engineering teams in a high-growth SaaS environment.
• You have experience managing managers and senior engineers, and you know how to scale your impact through clear expectations, healthy operating systems, and strong leadership talent.
• You bring meaningful product-led growth (PLG) experience, including ownership of onboarding, activation, conversion, monetization, cross-sell, or adjacent growth motions.
• You have built or scaled strong experimentation practices, whether through formal experimentation platforms or highly effective lightweight frameworks, and you know how to use them to drive product and business outcomes.
• You are a product-minded engineering leader who connects technical choices to customer value, adoption, and revenue impact.
• You have strong product sense and experience leading customer-facing application teams where UX quality, time-to-value, and iteration speed mattered.
• You bring enough frontend fluency to credibly lead teams building highly interactive, personalized customer experiences, and you care about polish, usability, and performance.
• You are highly data-driven in how you operate. You know how to identify funnel friction, define success metrics, evaluate tradeoffs, and course-correct quickly.
• You work exceptionally well with Product, Design, Data, GTM, and Support partners, and you can create clarity across ambiguous, cross-functional spaces.
• You move with urgency and judgment, set a high bar for execution, and are comfortable making hard tradeoffs in service of outcomes.
• 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.
• You use AI tools to accelerate exploration, shorten iteration cycles, and bring sharper ideas to the table.
• You bring a practical point of view on where AI meaningfully improves customer-facing products and internal engineering workflows, and you know how to balance speed with privacy, safety, and human judgment.

Nice to Haves

• Experience in martech, ecommerce, personalization, customer data, identity, or profile-linked products.
• Experience integrating with social platforms or building products on top of external ecosystem APIs.
• Experience with signed-in customer experiences, self-service support flows, merchandising, or account-management surfaces.
• Experience in zero-to-one product areas alongside more mature, scaled product portfolios.
• Familiarity with experimentation platforms, growth analytics, or personalization systems at scale.

Why This Role Matters

This role sits at the intersection of three high-leverage growth surfaces for Klaviyo: turning social engagement into richer customer profiles, helping customers activate and expand through product-led growth, and creating a more personalized onsite experience that keeps brands connected to their customers. The right leader will help turn these into a more connected portfolio—one that compounds customer value, accelerates growth, and raises the quality of Klaviyo's product experience.

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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.

Base Pay Range For US Locations: $244,000 — $366,000 USD

This role may require up to 10% travel for purposes such as new hire onboarding, client or partner work if applicable, team meetings, and industry events.