Senior Software Engineer - Product Recommendations

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.

Senior Software Engineer, Recommendations

Boston, MA (Hybrid)

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design, architecture, and operation of backend services that power product recommendations across Klaviyo experiences (email, SMS, KAgent, onsite, etc.), upholding standards for reliability, performance, and clear APIs.
• Architect and maintain robust, large-scale data processing pipelines (e.g., using Apache Spark or similar frameworks) that transform raw events and catalog data into high-quality features and inputs for recommendation models, ensuring data quality and lineage.
• Collaborate closely with ML engineers and product stakeholders to strategically productionize recommendation models—defining high-level interfaces, robust feature contracts, and advanced deployment patterns for batch and/or real-time inference systems.
• Drive the development of ML/AI systems such as vector search that power recommendation, semantic search, and sophisticated agentic use cases.
• Implement and evolve data and service observability (metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards) to proactively ensure recommendations are correct, fast, and highly available for all customers.
• Contribute to and mentor others on shared data frameworks, libraries, and architectural patterns to accelerate the development of new recommendation use cases and iteration velocity across the team.
• Work with Product to break down projects into clear milestones, balancing the need for rapid experimentation with technical soundness and long-term maintainability.
• Lead data-driven decision making and A/B testing efforts—ensuring recommendation systems are instrumented with the right metrics, and independently interpreting results to guide future product and engineering iterations.
• Participate in on-call and incident response for the systems you own, driving major post-incident follow-ups that substantially improve the resilience and operability of our recommendation stack.
• Champion and drive the transformation of engineering workflows by integrating AI from the ground up—for example, using AI to accelerate development, automate complex tests, or build smarter monitoring and debugging tools.
• Share knowledge, mentor junior/mid-level engineers, and define best practices on working with large-scale data frameworks, distributed systems, and integrating ML into production systems.

Who You Are

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with experience building and operating mission-critical backend services and systems in a production environment.
• Experience in backend and distributed systems at scale; you have a proven track record working on high-throughput, highly available services and are an skilled in optimizing for latency, reliability, and operability.
• Proficient in Python and open to working in other languages.
• Comfortable with cloud-native architectures (AWS preferred) and container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes); you manage infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines as a core part of your development process.
• Experience in data-driven decision making and A/B testing—you can define how to instrument experiments, read and interpret results, and ensure learnings are folded back into system design.
• Comfortable designing and querying data models in relational, analytical, and NoSQL datastores (e.g., Postgres, MySQL, data warehouses, Redis, vector databases).
• Feel at home with modern DevOps practices (CI/CD, monitoring, alerting) and how to apply them to architect large-scale data and recommendation systems.
• Track record of owning multi-component projects end-to-end—from initial technical design and implementation through rollout, monitoring, and sustained iteration.
• Excellent technical collaborator and communicator: you can clearly articulate complex technical trade-offs to both technical peers and non-technical partners, and you work effectively to drive alignment across ML Engineers, Software Engineers, PMs, and other teams.
• You are a self-starter who has actively experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are excited to responsibly explore and define new AI tools and workflows to enhance team productivity and system intelligence.

Nice to have

• Previous experience working on product recommendation systems or adjacent ML-powered features (ranking, personalization, search, or similar).
• Experience with big data frameworks such as Apache Spark (or similar technologies like Flink, Beam, etc.) for architecting and building complex batch or streaming pipelines.
• Experience in AI/ML systems and products, such as integrating models into production systems, building features powered by ML, or contributing to the ML infrastructure.
• Experience training and iterating on machine learning models (e.g., for ranking, prediction, or personalization).
• Experience with ML and distributed compute frameworks such as Ray or similar tools.
• Experience partnering with data science or ML teams to productionize models (designing feature stores, ensuring offline/online parity, advanced model deployment and monitoring).
• Background in e-commerce, marketing tech, or consumer personalization products.

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.

Base Pay Range For US Locations: $148,000—$222,000 USD

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 e-commerce 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.

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.

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