Senior IT Systems Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

This job is with Klaviyo, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

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.

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.

Klaviyo’s global corporate Information Technology (IT) team is responsible for providing technology systems, administration, and support to Klaviyos around the world. Our main goal is to ensure that Klaviyos everywhere have a strong technology foundation to do great work. The IT Team solves problems using technology and provides Klaviyo’s continued scalability and sustainable employee growth in a rapidly evolving environment.

The IT Systems team is primarily responsible for SaaS systems administration and end-to-end lifecycle management, building automation, and engineering solutions for both other internal teams and the business. The IT Systems team is highly collaborative, working closely with the IT Searchbar team, our end-user support team as well as with our Security, Risk, and Trust teams and the broader Engineering department. 

As a Senior IT Systems Engineer on the IT Systems team, you own the design, implementation, and long-term health of the enterprise systems Klaviyo runs on identity, endpoint management, and the SaaS platforms every Klaviyo touches. You will lead projects end to end, from SSO/SCIM rollouts to complex multi-tool integrations and automations, and you will be trusted to take an ambiguous business problem, define the problem statement yourself, and deliver a solution that scales. You will partner with operations, engineering, Security, and the IT Searchbar team, and act as a technical escalation point when systems break.

Klaviyo is building an AI-first future, and IT is where a lot of that gets real. You will use AI fluently in your own work and help design AI-assisted workflows into the systems we run for the rest of the company. This is a senior individual contributor role: no direct reports, high autonomy, and real ownership. We are looking for someone who has already run systems at scale, holds opinions grounded in experience, and can be handed a domain and trusted to run it.

• Own systems, not tickets. You will take a domain identity, endpoint, or a set of core SaaS platforms and be accountable for its reliability, security, and roadmap, raising the decisions that need to go higher and driving everything else yourself.
• Lead projects end to end at pace: scope the work, design the solution, plan the rollout and the rollback, communicate the change, and land it without skipping testing, peer review, or documentation to hit a date.
• Turn ambiguous business needs into clear problem statements and systems that hold up, so Klaviyos spend their time on their work instead of fighting their tools.
• Set the technical bar: clean configuration, least-privilege access by default, automation over manual toil, and runbooks the rest of the team can operate from without you in the room.
• Define what success looks like before you build, then prove it with data tickets deflected, provisioning time saved, coverage and compliance gaps closed.
• Raise the people around you: review others’ work, mentor engineers earlier in their careers, and give and receive direct, useful feedback.
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex system issues, drive root cause rather than symptoms, and feed what you learn back into the platform so the same incident does not happen twice.

• 4+ years of hands-on experience as a systems engineer or systems administrator, with a track record of owning enterprise systems in production not just operating them, but deciding how they should work.
• You define problem statements yourself. You can take a vague or contested business need, scope it, drive alignment with stakeholders, and deliver with minimal direction without losing the thread when priorities shift.
• Deep working knowledge across a wide range of IT systems, including enterprise device management, identity and access management, and endpoint security.
• You have deployed and managed macOS and iOS devices at scale through an MDM (Jamf preferred), including configuration profiles, policies, and OS update strategy. Windows management (Intune, Autopilot) is a strong plus.
• You have administered core SaaS platforms such as Google Workspace, Slack, Atlassian, and Zoom, including their security and admin controls.
• Hands-on experience with IdP configuration, management, and maintenance: SSO (SAML/OIDC), SCIM provisioning, group and role design, and app onboarding. Experience with Okta or Entra ID (Azure AD) is preferred.
• You have owned the identity lifecycle in practice onboarding, role changes, and offboarding and understand the security and audit consequences of getting it wrong.
• AI proficiency: AI is already part of how you work, and you can show it. You use LLM assistants and agents to research, write and debug code, draft documentation, and compress routine work, and you exercise judgment about when to trust the output. You are actively interested in putting AI into the systems you run automating triage, enrichment, and repetitive workflows for the wider company.
• You automate by default, and you have the scripting skills to do it: Bash, PowerShell, or Python. Python is preferred and AWS Lambda experience is a plus. You have replaced manual, repetitive work with automation other people now rely on, and you can safely read and modify someone else’s script.
• Comfortable working with APIs REST, JSON, authentication, and rate limits and building integrations between systems that do not natively talk to each other.
• You value clean, concise controls and easily editable security functionality within tools, and you can produce evidence for access reviews and audits (SOC 2, SOX) without it derailing your week.
• Disciplined change management: you test, get peer review, plan rollback, communicate to affected users, and document what changed including under pressure.
• You can debug a system problem you have never seen before, drive it to the root cause, and communicate clearly to non-technical stakeholders while it is still unresolved.
• You can evaluate vendors and tools on their merits: security posture, integration surface, total cost and make a defensible recommendation.
• Strong written communication. Your documentation, runbooks, and change notices are good enough that other people can act on them without asking you.
• Participation in an after-hours on-call rotation with the IT Systems team is required for site-specific or business-blocking issues.

• You have worked with Workato, Okta Workflows, n8n, or other similar SSO and automation solutions, and have built something non-trivial in one.
• Experience with enterprise-scale networking topics, including routing, DNS, DHCP, VPN, and building and maintaining multiple global office networks.
• Experience as a systems administrator or systems engineer in a fast-paced, high-growth IT environment, ideally supporting a globally distributed workforce.
• Experience building with AI beyond the chat window prompt and context engineering, connecting an LLM to systems via APIs or MCP, or running an AI-assisted workflow or agent in production.
• Experience with VPC, EC2, Security Groups, ACLs, and IAM in AWS and GCP.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible) or version-controlled configuration management for IT systems.
• Experience administering an ITSM platform such as Freshservice or Jira Service Management, including forms, workflows, SLAs, and reporting.
• Relevant certifications such as Jamf 200/300, Okta Certified Professional or Administrator, or associate-level AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

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 partici]]> <