Principal Business Intelligence Engineer

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.

Data is at the heart of every decision made at Klaviyo, and we’re looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Business Intelligence (BI) team. BI at Klaviyo collaborates across all departments to provide a platform that powers all internal data, analytic, and reporting needs. Our mission is to champion data-driven value creation, and you will own creating and maintaining the internal data infrastructure that powers Klaviyo’s business. This role in particular will oversee the infrastructure, pipelines, and security/compliance aspects of our internal analytics platform while driving architectural innovation and mentoring the team.

 Technologies We Use (Not Exhaustive):

• Amazon Web Services (EC2, EMR, S3, Lambda, Athena, DynamoDB, CodeBuild, etc.)
• Infrastructure such as Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker
• Compute engines like Snowflake, Spark, Trino, and Clickhouse built on top of cloud storage (Iceberg/Parquet)
• Orchestration tools (Airflow, dbt, etc.)
• Streaming platforms (Kafka) and ETLs Fivetran, and Airbyte

How You Will Make a Difference:

• Lead the design, implementation, and testing of data systems used by thousands of people, from architecture to production.
• Contribute to the development of long-term data strategies and roadmaps, influencing the technical direction of data engineering practices within the organization.
• Develop and maintain the “source of truth” data environment used by everyone at Klaviyo to measure the health of the business.
• Architect and productionize batch and real-time data systems to support various product and business needs.
• Build ETLs that can ingest multiple terabytes of data per day and support multi-petabyte data models.
• Ensure the quality, performance, and stability of data systems through robust quality systems and monitoring practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Platform Engineering, Security, Product, Finance, Go-To-Market, Customer Success, Support, Sales, and Marketing.
• Build data governance solutions into every part of the platform, ensuring compliance and security standards.
• Mentor and coach team members, providing guidance and support to enhance their skills and performance.

Who You Are:

You are a creator at heart who understands the importance of a well-designed data environment. You have a deep understanding of business problems within the company and how to create, transform, and store the data needed to solve these problems. You are a systematic thinker and enjoy finding creative technical solutions to hard problems by collaborating closely with your team. You are curious, constantly seeking the best solutions, and passionate about contributing to the success of a data-driven organization.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Proven track record of leading highly technical projects and delivering impactful results.
• Strong understanding of cloud technologies (AWS preferred).
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tooling such as Terraform.
• 7+ years of data development experience in SQL and 3+ years in object-oriented. programming languages (e.g., Python).
• Expertise in database design, 3NF, dimensional modeling, data vault, or star schema.
• Experience with Big Data technologies (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks/Spark, Trino).
• Experience building real-time data pipelines and working with massive amounts of semi-structured data.
• Knowledge of data and cloud engineering best practices (data discovery, data documentation, infrastructure development/deployment, and information security).
• Experience working with Docker and container orchestration services (e.g., ECS, Kubernetes).
• Experience building data products with a security first mindset.

Desired Skills:

• Leadership experience in the data infrastructure domain, with a focus on building and maintaining data ecosystems at scale.
• Experience building the backend layer of data-intensive products.
• Familiarity with multi-petabyte data models and TB-scale ingestion workflows.
• Ability to clearly c