Senior Manager of Engineering, Production Infrastructure

Klaviyo powers growth for thousands of businesses, and our R&D teams build on shared platform primitives. As the Senior Manager, Production Infrastructure, you’ll lead the teams behind our paved roads—compute runtimes, service networking/ingress, and observability—so product engineers can move fast on a stable, cost‑disciplined foundation. You’ll publish opinionated defaults ("golden paths"), install SLO discipline, and make reliability and developer experience measurable across the company. 

This is a hands‑on leadership role: you’ll stay close to architecture and operations, review designs and PRs, jump into incidents when needed, and prototype reference solutions that set the standard.

How You’ll Make a Difference

• Own and evolve platform primitives in scope (compute runtimes, service networking/ingress, observability) with clear APIs, SLOs, runbooks, and support tiers.


• Lead by example technically: drive design reviews, review PRs, and author reference implementations, starter repos, and Terraform/Helm modules that demonstrate the golden path.


• Deliver golden paths and self‑service scaffolding; reduce time‑to‑first‑service and lead time for changes.


• Raise the bar on reliability: incident response (blameless), alert hygiene, capacity planning, and on‑call health.


• Be production‑close: participate in critical incident response and postmortems; trace issues across Kubernetes, service mesh, and data paths; convert learnings into durable fixes, guardrails, and policy‑as‑code.


• Standardize observability end‑to‑end: expand OpenTelemetry adoption, define log/trace schemas, and make SLOs and error budgets first‑class in dashboards and alerts.


• Evolve our Kubernetes and networking layers: plan cluster upgrades, right‑size node/Pod configs, harden ingress/gateway policies, and advance mTLS/service identity and traffic shaping.


• Advance CI/CD and GitOps: ensure fast, safe deploys with progressive delivery, automatic rollbacks, and pre‑prod environments that mirror prod; enforce guardrails via policy‑as‑code.


• Stand up a concise scorecard (SLO coverage, incident frequency/severity, lead time, MTTR, developer platform NPS, cost‑to‑serve) and drive consistent trend improvements.


• Partner with Security, Data Platform, and Product to clarify ownership boundaries and enable safe, fast delivery.


• Improve cost‑to‑serve via quotas, right‑sizing, and showback in partnership with Finance.


• Transform workflows by putting AI at the center, building smarter systems and ways of working from the ground up; pilot AI‑assisted runbooks and incident summarization to shorten resolution time.

Who You Are

• 7–10+ years in infra/SRE/platform with 3–5+ years leading teams (including managers or staff/lead ICs).


• Demonstrated SRE practices (SLI/SLO design, incident mgmt, capacity planning) and experience with Kubernetes/container orchestration, service networking, IaC, and modern observability.


• Technically credible and hands‑on: comfortable reading and discussing code (e.g., Go, Python, or Java), reviewing PRs, and writing small prototypes/tooling when it accelerates the team.


• Fluent with Kubernetes internals (scheduling, autoscaling, resource management) and service networking (e.g., Envoy/Istio/Linkerd, API gateways).


• Operate the full observability stack (metrics, logs, traces, profiling) and instrument SLIs/SLOs using OpenTelemetry‑friendly patterns.


• Automate by default: Terraform (or Pulumi), Helm/Kustomize, GitOps, CI/CD; you prefer guardrails and policy‑as‑code over manual gates.


• You write crisp docs/diagrams and define platform contracts that hold up under scale.


• You drive measurable developer velocity and reliability improvements and communicate progress with clarity.


• You build inclusive, high‑trust teams and partner tightly across Security/Product/Finance.


• You’ve already experimented with AI in work or personal projects and are eager to deepen your fluency responsibly.

Nice to Haves

• Platforms "as a product" (DX metrics, roadmaps), event‑driven architectures, and cost‑to‑serve optimization in high‑growth SaaS.


• Experience contributing to platform code or tooling (e.g., base images, CLI/scaffolding, controllers/operators, admission/policy), multi‑cluster or multi‑region operations, and progressive delivery.

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