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 careers.klaviyo.com to see how we empower creators to own their own destiny.
Why You Should Join the API Team:
As a Lead Engineer joining the API team you can expect to be deeply involved in technical discussions across teams, building out public APIs, and growing the team. You will have input into the team’s mission, goals, and roadmap while collaborating along-side technical product owners, product managers, and product analysts. Together, you’ll define scope and specifications while refining RFCs to ensure deliverables are met and stability is maintained. You’ll also be a key player in helping drive the narrative for the technical evolution of the overall public API space as we invest in both our current and future experiences.
The API team is responsible for expanding our API surface to enable Klaviyo’s customers and partners to build on top of Klaviyo. Klaviyo already has APIs for storing data and sending communications, primarily for e-commerce applications, but we’re just getting started! We’re looking to expand our API surface to provide external developers the tools they need to solve core use cases.
This new role within Klaviyo has resulted from growth and there are ample opportunities to advance given the scope of this position and the team’s central role in Klaviyo’s product.
In 2022, Klaviyo did a major overhaul of its API foundation to align to industry standards for REST, rate-limiting, and authorization scopes. Learn more here!
How You Will Make a Difference:
- Meet and work with a number of engineers across the company to expand our API surface across Klaviyo’s various product areas.
- Open up clearly-defined services through our public APIs so that developers can access these objects programmatically.
- Build upon and enhance Klaviyo’s API framework foundation. This includes features such as framework support for pagination, improvements to versioning, observability, documentation, etc.
- Participate in the cross-team API Review Council (ARC) to review teams’ API RFCs as well as make decisions on API standards. This team will be responsible for building tools and frameworks recommended by the ARC.
- Partner with our Go-to-Market team (solution architects, support engineers, developer advocates) to better understand issues developers are facing with our APIs to design and build solutions.
Technologies We Use (No Experience Necessary)
We currently use the list of technologies below but are always looking to find the best tools for the jobs that help our customers (and very open to adding technologies given the right circumstances). We don’t expect you to have any experience in the tools below and we will provide whatever training you need to level up and succeed!
Our current tech stack:
- Django, React
- Stripe, Avalara
- RabbitMQ, Celery, Kafka, Pulsar
- MySQL, Redis, Memcached, Clickhouse
- AWS (EC2, RDS, Aurora, S3, etc.), Kubernetes, Terraform, Jenkins
Who You Are:
- Extensive experience architecting, building and using a wide variety of public APIs
- Solid understanding of the full stack of technologies that are needed to build and run an API from the ground up
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience
- 8 years of experience in software development, and strong knowledge of computer science fundamentals
- 5 years of experience testing, developing, and launching software products
- 3 years of experience with software design and architecture
- Experience debugging performance issues and improving application performance
- Proven experience with being a coach and a mentor for team members and helping them grow
Bonus Points:
- Experience with AWS
- Experience with Python and Django
- Experience creating new applications with scalability in mind
- Experience working with both monolithic and microservices architectures
- Hands-on experience designing reliable, fault-tolerant, and high performance distributed systems
- Track record of working on high visibility projects with requirements you have to actively seek out. Desire to be judged on measurable outcomes and change process to achieve those outcomes
- Experience talking to customers and listening deeply to their wants and needs
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 ecommerce 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.
Upon request, you can receive additional information about the compensation and benefits for this role. Requests can be submitted here. Additional information regarding benefits can be found at klaviyorewards.com.
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.
You can find our Job Applicant Privacy Notice here.
