Klaviyo

I've worked in the tech industry for over 20 years, and I've seen significant improvements over time. Initially, I struggled to balance my family and professional life, but with the introduction of parental leave, flexible work hours and hybrid work arrangements, women and parents are receiving better support today.

Another challenge I faced was establishing credibility as a woman with a strong technical voice. However, at Klaviyo, inclusivity is a priority, and I appreciate that we are intentional about ensuring that all voices are heard.

I enjoy creating products that customers find valuable and use. At Klaviyo, I am focused on developing user-friendly experiences within the core marketing application. Witnessing our customers' success as they embrace these features is fulfilling.

My personal objectives include advancing as a leader, fostering a culture that enables engineers to excel and contributing to Klaviyo's growth. Klaviyo offers a comprehensive range of career development resources, including a $3,000 learning stipend for ongoing education, career counseling, conference attendance and a free book program.

I participate in hiring early-career talent, including interns and co-op students. We focus on recruiting from a diverse talent pool and provide professional support throughout their internships. This includes finding the right mentors and maintaining regular communication to ensure a positive learning experience.

When it comes to promotions and career development, we consider different learning and collaboration styles to ensure inclusive decision-making. Our engineering culture is characterized by openness and transparency. We encourage public discussions on Slack and consider constructive feedback to be the norm.

One word: growth. Klaviyo fosters a strong culture of learning and support. When I joined as a software engineer II, transitioning from a data scientist role, it was a big leap — but I was given the space and encouragement to grow.

In just a few years, I've gained experience with industry-leading technologies like Spark, Apache Iceberg and Apache Flink while also developing both technical and soft skills through project ownership. Even early on, my manager empowered me to lead initiatives and drive team objectives.

Klaviyo invests in engineers through learning stipends, mentorship programs and opportunities to attend conferences and training sessions. That commitment to development is something I truly value. The collaboration here is also a highlight.

Whether it's engineers, product managers or designers, everyone is approachable, and there's a strong culture of helping each other out. I'm proud of the features we build and excited to see the impact they make on our customers. Every new project feels like another opportunity to grow and contribute.

When I joined Klaviyo as a junior engineer, I believe my background in both data science and web applications made me a strong fit, especially since the team was a part of the data science department at the time. Having experience in both areas helped me bridge the gap between analysis and implementation.

Strong technical and communication skills were also key in the interview process. Being able to explain my thinking clearly and collaborate cross-functionally was just as important as writing code. After I joined, another valuable asset was my experience with Spark and distributed systems.

Klaviyo processes millions of records, and when we migrated to a data lake, my familiarity with large-scale Spark jobs helped the team adapt more quickly. Sometimes, skills you've picked up from past roles can become unexpectedly useful. Staying up to date with popular and evolving technologies can give you an edge — even if you don't know exactly when you'll use them.

Find a role model within your team or org; someone whose path you admire. Observe how they work, communicate and lead. It's one of the fastest ways to grow, both technically and professionally.

Be proactive. Look for chances to take ownership and contribute beyond what's expected. Communication skills, initiative and the ability to learn quickly are just as important as technical knowledge.

Take full advantage of learning resources, whether it's internal documentation, Slack history, the company wiki, codebases or online tutorials. Being resourceful and self-driven can help you ramp up faster, unblock yourself, and solve problems more effectively.

If you're aiming for a "dream job," focus on aligning your experience with the role. Build up the skills that are in high demand for that position. In the end, curiosity, adaptability and a growth mindset are what help engineers stand out in competitive environments.

Klaviyo provides the space for ambitious people to grow and excel in their careers – without the egos. Indubitably, this mentality has allowed me to prosper, and to do that alongside equally ambitious, smart, and talented folks is infinitely rewarding.

I appreciate the fast turnaround between employee feedback and changes implemented by leadership. To me, that shows Klaviyo is growing in the right direction internally. That and the ambitious environment make it the right place for me.

We take a three-pronged approach to staying at the forefront of innovation: internal knowledge-sharing, external industry engagement and intentional research. Teams regularly share insights from sources like Hacker News, LinkedIn and academic papers in Slack and meetings.

Our Boston and Silicon Valley teams stay connected to academia and industry leaders — including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta — to exchange ideas and track trends. When exploring new domains, we organize focused reading groups, tap into recent academic research and empower interns and new grads to lead learning sessions — ensuring our teams remain informed, agile and ahead of the curve.

We're innovating in product recommendations for email marketing and customer service by moving beyond static, history-based models. Our approach integrates conversational context, allowing agents to handle open-ended prompts like "a gift for my mom" in real time — bridging the gap between search and recommendation.

While we use proven technologies like deep neural networks, the real innovation lies in how we apply AI to structure messy customer data. By cleaning and interpreting this data first, we turn Klaviyo's data scale and depth into a competitive edge for precision machine learning applications — solving challenges that traditional search engines aren't built to handle.

We foster an engineering mindset grounded in curiosity, experimentation and continuous learning. Hackathons, quick prototypes and open knowledge-sharing help us explore ideas efficiently and collaboratively. On the tactical side, we've built deep observability into our stack to monitor and refine model performance and we own our own Statsig experimentation capability — enabling rigorous A/B testing to validate impact.

This combination of culture and infrastructure empowers our teams to move fast, test boldly and deliver real value.

At Klaviyo, I'm part of the K-Service group, where we're building a new suite of products to transform the customer experience for e-commerce brands — before, during and after the sale. Think of it like creating an Amazon-style experience for Shopify businesses.

Under this umbrella, we've developed tools like Customer Agent, an AI chatbot for pre-sales and support, Help Desk for human agents, powered by Klaviyo's rich data, and Customer Hub, which brings personalization, merchandising and support together on the storefront. Our goal is to help e-commerce brands, whether emerging or scaling, deliver more intelligent, data-driven service that doesn't just resolve issues but drives revenue and builds stronger customer relationships.

I use AI every day both as an engineer and as a cross-functional partner to nearly 50 people across product and engineering. Because I move between teams often, context switching is intense. AI helps me stay on top of changes by summarizing code and system design updates, so I can quickly re-engage wherever I'm needed.

Within Customer Agent, our AI-powered solution, we also use AI to accelerate how we learn and explore new domains. Whether it's prototyping or clarifying a complex feature, AI helps us surface unknowns and quickly build expertise in areas that once required significant time and effort, enabling us to design the best possible AI UX for our customers.

Customer Agent is a complex product, not just a single feature. Without AI, building it would be significantly slower, especially for engineers like me who don't come from a machine learning background. AI surfaces approaches we wouldn't know to look for and fills in critical knowledge gaps.

It helps me uncover "unknown unknowns," so I can upskill in real time and immediately apply those learnings to the work. On a practical level, we also use AI to rapidly prototype new features, test ideas and iterate quickly, allowing us to deliver value to customers faster.

AI hasn't replaced my role as a software engineer, but it has dramatically expanded what I can accomplish and how efficiently I can do it.

On top of all the engineering skills I've acquired since I started at Klaviyo, I've also been given the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of the business from the perspective of a number of different organizations. Being seen as a subject-matter expert has allowed me to gain insights into how the Sales, Support, BI, and Marketing teams operate.