Hello, everybody, my name is Alan Chavez. I am the CTO at Klaviyo.
About Klaviyo and what they do
We think of ourselves as a unified customer platform. And it's composed of three parts. There's a customer database at the bottom experiences at the top, where you allow our customers to create messages, personalized messages to their customers, and submit them either through email or SMS. And then at the top of that, we see ourselves as a company that builds intelligence, through data science into our product, just so our customers can have the help that they need in order to do the communication to their customers.
Size of their engineering team
I've been here like two and a half years, every year, I've doubled the engineering team. And we're doing that again this year. So it's in the hundreds is the number that we have for engineers.
Interesting projects engineers get to work on
What I usually say to candidates is that whatever your interests are, we actually are trying to solve that problem. So if your interest is in high throughput, data ingestion, and manipulation of data, we have that we process billions of events, through hundreds of integrations with third parties. So we're always trying to solve that problem in a performant way. If your interest lies in creating solutions that customers love us experiences that customers love, we have, we are completely revamping our user experience with a new design system. If your interests are in the data science, using machine learning to add intelligence to a software in a way that helps customers, we have that in spades. If your interest is in doing processing at scale, and integrating with third parties to send messages, emails, SMS, we have that in spades. If your interest is in creating a platform that empowers third party developers, we invest in on that too. So we have really, really interesting projects kind of going on in all of these areas, we just need help with them.
Details on the tech stack
We're not very religious about technology. But just as a result of where the company's journey has been, we are primarily a Python shop. In terms of data store, we have a lot of relational, MySQL, and Postgres. We also use Cassandra, we use click house. And of course, everything is hosted in the public cloud. In our case, in AWS. We have some parts of the system that use other languages like Java, but for the most part is Python.
What to expect during the interview process
So here's what we're testing, we're assessing candidates on one is learning or is slow your ability to learn and continue to evolve. Why? Well, tech industry if you stop learning, in six months year, it's really you're completely outdated. Number two is problem-solving. So in a specific set problem solving, not specific knowledge of the technology, because technology's given the first point, people will learn what we're trying to assess. How is a given a real world problem, a problem that you would face in your day to day? How is it you do that problem? So our interview process is geared towards really practical problems in a design problem, or a coding problem that is you're going to face in your job, day to day? And then finally, we are assessing for something really important to us, which is you fit? And that is about? Are you a great collaborator, not only with the engineering team, but across do you make the teams that you are part of better than they are without you? So we're trying to assess all three parts in the interview process. And we have had tremendous success because the people that we're hiring really hit all three points that I just described.
About Klaviyo's culture
I guess I would describe that. No ego, collaboration, learning, in the realization that we were part of a winning team. We're seeing a lot of success in the marketplace, helping customers with that we face thorny technical problems that we need to solve. So this endless loop of really interesting problems to tackle that solve real customer problems. Then we need to solve as a team. So the culture is all of this, to get customer orientation, their ability to learn on this learning culture. And the fact that we are always having to evolve our technology to just support allows us to scale that we see what we actually provide engineers on employees, for instance, unlimited budget for books, it doesn't have to be technical books, whatever makes you better. And it's unlimited. The ability to go to conferences and learn. So we preach what we, we say, right, which is, we want you to be learning, we want people that are acclaiming, to continue to evolve, and have that what we usually say internally is, we want to create a place where engineers have the best can to the best work of their lives directly from someplace that in the future, when they look back, they're gonna say, You know what, the work I did at Klaviyo was the best work of my career. Why? Because of the environment that I had, the opportunities that I had to grow, and the problems that we're trying to solve from a customer and technical standpoint, that's what we're striving for, as part of the culture.
Why now is the ideal time to join
Klaviyo is a company that has been growing like crazy. And what I mean by that is not only the number of customers, we have hundreds of 1000s of customers using our platform, each one of those customers that are increasing the usage of the platform is just that sticky. And we are looking to continue to evolve technology continue to solve the existing customer problems, and we see and expand in different product areas. They are adjacent to what we do today. In all in a company with a lot of talent, you can be sure to learn from and teach to in an environment that is absolute. It's hard to explain when you're not inside Klaviyo is that feeling that there's a winning team with solving these problems, customers super excited about what we do. The problems we're trying to solve are so interesting, that it just produces a great environment to grow your career in the future.
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