Lead Software Engineer - Environments; Dev Infra

Lead Software Engineer - Environments (Dev Infra)

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.

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Why You Should Join the Environments Team

Join our mission to revolutionize developer velocity by removing the friction of infrastructure management. As the Lead Software Engineer for the Environments team, you will be a hands-on technical leader responsible for the tools and systems that allow our engineers to spin up fully provisioned, short-lived environments instantly. You will bridge the gap between local development and production-scale testing, ensuring that our "+reproducible anywhere" philosophy translates into high-quality code delivery.

From refining local workflows to scaling our ephemeral environment platform, you will design, code, and ship the foundational systems that empower every engineer at the company to test and deploy with confidence.

What You ll Achieve:
Key Responsibilities

You will be the primary technical driver behind our environment strategy, focusing on making "production-parity" accessible to every engineer:

• Technical Leadership: Act as the Lead Individual Contributor (IC) and subject matter expert for environment orchestration, mentoring other engineers and championing a culture of seamless, on-demand testing.
• Architecture & Scalability: Lead the design and evolution of our existing platform to support complex, multi-service architectures, ensuring environments are isolated, secure, and performant.
• Abstract Complexity: Productize our internal infrastructure by architecting self-service tools that automate the heavy lifting of service provisioning. You will eliminate manual setup and "+it works on my machine" hurdles, enabling developers to focus their energy on building world-class application logic and UX.
• Drive Reproducibility: Future-proof the platform by exploring "reproducible anywhere" capabilities, enabling these short-lived environments to run seamlessly across cloud providers and local development setups.
• Optimize E2E & Manual Testing: Partner with QA and Product teams to ensure ephemeral environments are the gold standard for end-to-end testing and stakeholder reviews.
• Operational Excellence: Define standards for environment lifecycle management, including automated cleanup (reaping), cost-tracking, and observability for transient infrastructure.
• Hot Start & High Impact: This project already exists and has momentum. Your first 90 days will involve taking the reins of a functional system and identifying the architectural leaps needed to bring it into the future.
• Shape the Future of Dev Ex: You will define how a rapidly growing engineering organization interacts with infrastructure. You aren’t just managing servers; you are building a product where the "customers" are your fellow engineers.
• Ownership and Ambition: As a Lead IC, you have significant autonomy to choose the right tools and patterns. You’ll solve complex problems like data sanitization for test environments and service mesh routing that directly impact company-wide velocity.

Who You Are:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
  , with a recent focus on Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, or Full-Stack Development.
• Architectural Visionary:
  You have a proven track record of leading large-scale technical projects as an individual contributor, navigating complexity without needing a management title.
• Architectural Visionary & Lead Individual Contributor: You have a proven track record of leading large-scale technical projects. You are a "Lead by doing" engineer who prefers to be in the IDE, navigating complexity through direct implementation rather than just management.
• Full-Stack Practitioner: You are a hands-on expert across the stack. You can build…