Principal Software Engineer

Who you are

• 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
• Technical expertise: Data ingestion/CDC, stream processing, batch orchestration, lakehouse patterns, catalog/lineage, governance, and access controls, measured by freshness, availability, and correctness SLOs
• AI tools & automation: You apply ML/GenAI to data platforms - semantic catalog search, auto‑docs, data‑quality anomaly detection, SQL/pipeline generation - with human‑in‑the‑loop review and privacy controls
• Influence & enablement: You land data contracts, connectors, and templates that speed delivery for producers and consumers; you mentor via design docs and pairing
• AI fluency (Klaviyo default): You experiment, learn fast, and share AI wins responsibly
• Regional isolation/replication strategies, privacy‑by‑design, and data governance in regulated contexts
• Adopted paved roads: Producers/consumers are on standard ingestion, processing, and storage paths; schema governance and contracts reduce breakage
• SLOs & efficiency: ≥99.9% freshness for key domains; measurable cost/TB reductions; production debugging is faster with defined readiness reviews and incident learning
• 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

What the job involves

• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Profile, tune, and right‑size systems for performance and cost; partner with FinOps on unit‑economics guardrails
• Pair with product teams and analytics/ML to expose the right abstractions and unblock customer value quickly
• Contribute high‑quality code and reviews; mentor Staff/ Sr. engineers across pillars through example and enablement (not line management)
• 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
• ---Success in 6 - 12 Months---
• Adopted “paved roads” for producers/consumers; ≥99.9% freshness SLO for key domains; measurable cost/TB reductions
• One or more step‑change improvements (e.g., 2× faster ingest → analytics latency) demonstrated with metrics and post‑incident trend‑down

Benefits

• Private medical insurance
• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• Lifestyle spending account
• Commuter benefits
• Modern Health - wellness platform
• Parental leave
• Company equity
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Health savings account (HSA)
• Flexible spending accounts (FSAs)
• Employee assistance program (EAP)
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Flexible paid time off (FPTO)
• 13 company holidays
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Medical, Dental, Vision
• Pension
• Financial coaching
• Life insurance
• Income protection
• Annual leave - up to 25 annual leave days
• 10 company holidays (8 bank holidays + 2 recharge days)
• Family leave
• Cycle to Work benefit
• Mental health benefits