Broken Promises and Trust - Anonymous employee Klaviyo Employee Review

2.0
Feb 24, 2023
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The ICs and regular employees are really great people. There are a lot of opportunities to learn new things here, I learn new things all the time. Financially the company is solid and the product is pretty good. Customers like our product a lot and it works well for them.

Cons

Leadership has really taken a turn for the worse. In 2020 - 2022 they hired more than half of the company as remote employees all over the country and are now pivoting back to in office. The CEO told us that if we don't like it and aren't passionate enough to come in then we should leave. When we were hired we were told Klaviyo would be "remote first". We believed them and they have now broken that promise and lost our trust. Other leaders just do whatever the CEO wants, there is no discussion or push back. The company asks for our opinions in various surveys, but then completely ignores the feedback. The CEO does town halls, but dodges questions or answers by telling us how Klaviyo has to be one of the greatest companies ever or it won't matter. None of our amazing growth is good enough for the CEO, he wants more and more. It just comes off greedy. The return to office policies have been very unpopular, but the CEO does not care. In late 2022 they announced a new Hub based approach with hubs in Boston and Denver. This featured weeks where everyone within 50 miles of those hubs had to come in for 3 days. We had exactly one of those weeks in 2023 and feedback was overwhelmingly negative. So what did they do? They doubled down and very abruptly changed the policy. Now everyone within 50 miles of Boston or Denver needs to come in at least 2 days a week by the end of the year. Commuting benefits are meager and won't cover parking for more than a few days a month too. Remote employees are allowed to stay, but it's very clear they are not wanted long term. So now the whole company is in turmoil. Half the people don't know if they will be asked to leave in a year or so if they remain remote. The other half are looking at driving up to 50 miles to the office 2 or more times a week.

Explore other reviews about Klaviyo

5.0
Jul 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good benefit, good WLB, genuine good people

Cons

The race to inject AI into everything has really sucked the soul out of this job

1.0
Apr 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits, free food, tech talks.

Cons

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.

7
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