PIPELINE - L5 Principal Software Engineer

Boston · USD 244,000-366,000 · 10+ years experience · Posted Oct 7, 2026

At a glance

Own the technical direction and delivery for Klaviyo's data platform, spanning streaming, batch compute, storage/lakehouse, and governance.
Design and ship systems that are fast, reliable, cost-efficient, and safe for autonomous access as an individual contributor leading through architecture, code, and influence.

Design and implement core data platform capabilities including 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, and 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 while partnering 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 while mentoring Staff and Senior engineers across pillars through example and enablement.
Use AI to streamline data workflows, from authoring and testing pipelines to catalog/search and data quality, so analysts, ML, and product teams move faster with confidence.

10+ years building and operating distributed data systems with multi-tenant reliability.
Technical expertise in data ingestion/CDC, stream processing, batch orchestration, lakehouse patterns, catalog/lineage, governance, and access controls measured by freshness, availability, and correctness SLOs.
Experience applying ML/GenAI to data platforms including semantic catalog search, auto-docs, data-quality anomaly detection, and SQL/pipeline generation with human-in-the-loop review and privacy controls.
Demonstrated ability to land data contracts, connectors, and templates that speed delivery for producers and consumers, and mentor via design docs and pairing.
AI fluency including experimenting, learning fast, and sharing AI wins responsibly.

Regional isolation/replication strategies, privacy-by-design, and data governance in regulated contexts.
Adopted paved roads where producers and consumers are on standard ingestion, processing, and storage paths with schema governance and contracts reducing breakage.
Achieving a greater than or equal to 99.9% freshness SLO for key domains, measurable cost/TB reductions, and faster production debugging with defined readiness reviews and incident learning.
AI-augmented data operations where semantic discovery and auto-documentation cover the majority of high-value datasets.
AI-assisted data quality monitors reducing data incidents on top pipelines by 25 to 40 percent.
Pipeline authoring and review times dropping 15 to 25 percent with AI in the loop.

Company's annual cash bonus plan
Equity
Sign-on payments
Comprehensive range of health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits based on eligibility

This role may require up to 10% travel for purposes such as new hire onboarding, client or partner work if applicable, team meetings, and industry events.