John L. Moody

The Journey

I'm an engineering manager who's spent years learning the hard way that managing people is nothing like writing code. The skills that made me a good developer — optimizing for efficiency, finding the "right" answer, working heads-down for hours — turned out to be almost useless (and sometimes actively harmful) when applied to leading a team.

What I Do

I currently lead the Email Platforms team at Klaviyo, where my team has been at the center of one of the company's most ambitious infrastructure efforts: bringing Klaviyo's email sending capacity fully in-house. That meant building the systems to handle billions of sends on our own infrastructure — deliverability, throughput, reliability, the whole stack — rather than depending on third-party email service providers. It's been one of the most challenging and rewarding things I've worked on.

Why I Write

This blog is where I share what I'm learning along the way — about email infrastructure at scale, engineering culture, leading teams through hard technical bets, and the messy reality of figuring it out as you go.

When I'm not managing or writing, you'll find me exploring new programming languages (lately Go), reading about leadership, or thinking about how AI is reshaping what it means to lead technical teams.

Get in Touch

I spend my days deep in email infrastructure — SMTP, deliverability, throughput at scale — so I appreciate good communication channels. The best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. Whether you want to talk email systems, engineering leadership, or just swap war stories from the trenches, I'm always happy to connect.

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