Distinguished Engineer, Enterprise Scalability

<div class="content-intro"><p><em>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 <a class="_ymio1r31 _ypr0glyw _zcxs1o36 _mizu194a _1ah3dkaa _ra3xnqa1 _128mdkaa _1cvmnqa1 _4davt94y _4bfu18uv _1hms8stv _ajmmnqa1 _vchhusvi _kqswh2mm _ect4ttxp _syaz13af _1a3b18uv _4fpr8stv _5goinqa1 _f8pj13af _9oik18uv _1bnxglyw _jf4cnqa1 _30l313af _1nrm18uv _c2waglyw _1iohnqa1 _9h8h12zz _10531ra0 _1ien1ra0 _n0fx1ra0 _1vhv17z1" href="http://klaviyo.com/careers" data-renderer-mark="true">klaviyo.com/careers</a>&nbsp;to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.</em></p></div><p>Be Klaviyo’s senior IC for scale, you will report into a VP of Engineering and lead performance, reliability, multi‑region, and large‑tenant readiness. You’ll drive platform-wide architectural change, hunt bottlenecks and optimize systems, and partner across teams to productionize improvements. Given that this is an IC role with no direct reports; you will lead via technical depth, hands‑on impact, and crisp cross‑org alignment.</p> <p><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></p> <ul> <li>Define enterprise scalability fitness functions (latency/throughput/error rates) and a scorecard; align teams to SLOs and budgets.</li> <li>Design/implement sharding and partitioning strategies, caching/back‑pressure, multi‑region readiness, and high‑volume migration paths.</li> <li>Build lightweight enablement: benchmarks, profiling harnesses, reproducible testbeds; pair with teams to land fixes.</li> <li>Lead scalability reviews and readiness gates that accelerate—not block—delivery; drive incident deep dives tied to systemic fixes.</li> <li>Communicate clearly to execs and engineers, tying technical work to business impact and customer outcomes.</li> <li>Integrate AI into scale and resiliency work—from proactive anomaly detection to synthetic load and guided runbooks—so performance improvements stick and incidents don’t repeat.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Who You Are</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience: 12+ years scaling multi‑tenant SaaS with a reputation for removing major bottlenecks and proving impact with data.</li> <li>Technical expertise: Performance engineering, capacity planning, sharding/partitioning, caching/back‑pressure, multi‑region readiness, and high‑volume migrations; you turn hotspots into robust patterns.</li> <li>AI tools &amp; automation: You apply AI to scale work—profiling assistance, workload modeling, synthetic traffic generation, anomaly detection, and runbook copilots—always with explicit guardrails and observability.</li> <li>Cross‑org influence: You align teams through fitness functions, scorecards, and readiness gates that accelerate—not block—delivery; you communicate tradeoffs crisply to execs and engineers.</li> <li>AI fluency: Curious, adaptable, and proactive in exploring AI that responsibly improves scale outcomes.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Nice to Haves</strong></p> <ul> <li>Scale scorecard: Company‑wide fitness functions (latency/throughput/error rates) are adopted and reviewed regularly.</li> <li>High‑impact wins: 2–3 bottlenecks removed with documented, reproducible testbeds; pXX latencies and error rates improve on top enterprise workloads; repeat P0s trend down.</li> <li>AI‑assisted scale engineering: AI‑driven anomaly detection reduces alert noise while improving signal; generative load testing and copilot runbooks are used in release/readiness checks for the top critical services; time‑to‑isolate regressions drops 20–30%.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Success in 6–12 Months</strong></p> <ul> <li>Company‑wide scale scorecard in place; 2–3 high‑impact bottlenecks removed; top enterprise workloads show improved pXX latencies and error rates; fewer repeat P0s.</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>We use Covey as part of our hiring and / or promotional process. For jobs or candidates in NYC, certain features may qualify it as an AEDT. As part of the evaluation process we provide Covey with job requirements and candidate submitted applications. We began using <a href="https://getcovey.com/product/covey-scout-inbound">Covey Scout for Inbound</a> on April 3, 2025.&lt