This AI Engineer II role suits backend software developers with professional experience in generative AI who want to build conversational platforms in Boston, Massachusetts. Located in Boston, MA, the position centers on creating scalable backend systems and AI-powered product experiences for Klaviyo's customer agent team.
Role Overview
Klaviyo is hiring an AI Engineer II for the Customer Agent team in Boston, MA. This position focuses on building scalable backend architectures and intelligent systems that enable conversational agents to retrieve context, utilize tools, and execute actions for customers. The role involves backend-heavy software engineering with opportunities to contribute to user-facing applications and production reliability.
Key Responsibilities
Build and improve reliable backend systems and APIs that power AI-driven customer experiences.
Develop production agentic features involving tool use, context management, retrieval, structured outputs, orchestration, and multi-step workflows.
Contribute to solving applied AI problems across retrieval and RAG, grounding, hallucination mitigation, model selection, and choosing between LLM-based, deterministic, or hybrid approaches.
Build and use evaluation approaches including representative datasets, automated and human evaluation, regression testing, qualitative error analysis, and production signals.
Improve system reliability through guardrails, retries, fallbacks, observability, monitoring, and thoughtful failure handling.
Build asynchronous and distributed processing workflows that support AI workloads at scale.
Participate in an on-call rotation and help diagnose, mitigate, and learn from production incidents.
Work with external customers and cross-functional partners to understand workflows, identify pain points, and translate feedback into product improvements.
Monitor shipped experiences and use quality metrics, system performance, and customer feedback to guide iteration.
Requirements
Minimum of 3 years of professional software engineering experience, with experience building backend systems or distributed applications.
Hands-on experience building or contributing to generative AI or agentic AI applications, ideally used by real users or in production environments.
Proficiency in Python and experience with modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI or Django.
Experience with asynchronous processing or distributed task/event systems such as Celery, Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, or Redis.
Working knowledge of databases, data modeling, APIs, and persistence patterns used in production systems.
Comfortable working in cloud environments and experience with technologies such as AWS, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, or CI/CD systems.
Ability to reason about tradeoffs among quality, latency, cost, reliability, and implementation complexity.
Comfortable working through ambiguity, breaking larger problems into smaller pieces, and making progress without every requirement being fully specified.
Experience with, or strong interest in, working directly with external customers to understand problems and improve products.
Nice to Have
Experience training, fine-tuning, distilling, or otherwise adapting machine learning or language models.
Experience with reinforcement learning or feedback-driven optimization.
Experience with evaluation infrastructure such as LLM-as-judge systems, evaluator calibration, benchmark datasets, or AI quality tooling.
Experience operating AI systems at meaningful production scale or optimizing inference cost, latency, or throughput.
Skills and Tools
Python
FastAPI
Django
Celery
Kafka
SQS
RabbitMQ
Redis
AWS
Kubernetes
Generative AI
RAG
Salary and Benefits
The base salary range for US locations is $116,000 to $174,000 USD, determined by factors such as job-related skills, experience, education, and work location. The total compensation package may include an annual cash bonus plan, equity, sign-on payments, and comprehensive health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits.
About the Company
Klaviyo empowers creators to own their destiny by making first-party data accessible and actionable to nurture personalized ecommerce experiences. The company values diverse backgrounds and perspectives, offering equal opportunity and non-discrimination.
How to Apply
Candidates should apply directly on the official Klaviyo careers page.
