Fast paced with high earning potential - Account Executive Klaviyo Employee Review

Benefits, free food, tech talks.

I had high expectations coming into Klaviyo, but the reality fell far short. The biggest issue is leadership. There is a clear lack of the experience and judgment needed to effectively lead a modern engineering organization. Decision-making often feels reactive rather than strategic, and there’s little evidence of long-term technical vision. Instead of empowering experienced professionals, leadership tends to micromanage as if they’re overseeing a group of junior interns rather than seasoned engineers. From a technical standpoint, the quality of the codebase and product is concerning. Much of the system feels like a patchwork of rushed solutions—often reminiscent of a half-baked college project rather than a mature, production-grade platform. Core areas suffer from poor system design, weak data models, and significant technical debt that is consistently ignored rather than addressed. Project expectations are frequently unrealistic. Leadership pushes aggressive timelines without accounting for the underlying technical challenges or existing debt. There’s little regard for sustainable development practices, which leads to constant firefighting instead of building robust, scalable systems. The result is a frustrating environment where engineers spend more time working around problems than solving them properly. For a company at this stage, the gap between where things are and where they should be is hard to overlook.

At the moment, the salary is alright.

My perspective from engineering: * The CEO explicitly tells us AI is going to replace us all and that if you aren’t excited by that idea, you don’t belong. * Engineering has been entirely gutted in the last year, and more will leave soon. We’ve lost most of the people who had enough tenure to understand why some of our systems are the way they are. * Leadership’s communication and behavior leaves us in constant fear of more layoffs. * There’s an expectation all in engineering stop traditional development (even with AI tools) and switch to agent-only code generation by mid-year. * Metrics like # PRs merged per week, lines of code generated, # of tab completions in cursor, and various forms of other AI tool usage are tracked and used for your evaluation. * The stock is in the tank. But that likely won’t matter for newer hires since they moved away from giving stock compensation. * 60 hour work weeks are the norm to hit “meets expectations” for your role, depending on your team. Expect to have to pull 70-80 hours sometimes. * The codebases are the result of over ten years of taking on technical debt with very rare occurrences that it is cleaned up. Any work done to make improvements tends not to be valued, and going forward, the assumption seems to be the agents will do this. * Promotions are nearly impossible now. * The product itself is really poor quality due to much of the above. Also, the CEO has stated that “SaaS is dead”, so this likely will never change. All-in-all, it’s been exhausting working here watching a company collapse internally so quickly. Unless if you’re interested in seeing what that looks like, stay away.