Intercom was founded in 2011 to change the standard of customer service online. Our AI-first customer service platform is a totally new way to deliver customer service and is designed to transform the way businesses interact with their customers through AI. We all know that customer service on the internet sucks. It’s slow and impersonal. We help businesses provide instant and exceptional service to their customers and maximize their support agents’ productivity, efficiency, and performance—all through our single AI system. More than 25,000 businesses use Intercom to send millions of messages to millions of customers each month.Intercom has been a long-standing product leader and cultural icon in the technology and startup worlds for more than a decade. We set the pace for our industry and live by our values that allow us to push boundaries, build with speed and intensity, and deliver incredible value to our customers.Join us on our mission to redefine customer service and make internet business personal.
What’s the opportunity?
We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the team that enables the core technologies that Intercom is built on. This is for you if you are passionate about building and scaling systems such as MySQL, ElasticSearch, ingestion pipelines, and owning how they operate from low level systems engineering to all parts of our Rails and Python monoliths.
Our team’s mission is to accelerate Intercom’s growth and stability through educated and operationally excellent core technology usage. This means that we’re here to help product engineers and ML scientists build simpler, more performant product - faster. This can be through things like making low level database improvements that enhance everyone's experience, building best in class Elasticsearch tooling, or partnering with teams that utilise any of Intercom’s core technologies or our build patterns. Previous projects from the team include future-proofing our databases through sharding and building a mechanism to migrate Elasticsearch indexes for scale and profit.
We’re building a robust platform where your expertise will be applied to areas such as building a beautiful Messenger, an efficient teammate experience, a secure by default system, all while scaling the platform to billions of users and shipping two hundred new versions of Intercom to production every day.
Delve deeper into our engineering culture at intercom.engineering and explore our engineering values.
What will I be doing?
- Collaborate with world-class domain experts to shape our technical direction and infrastructure as we grow.
- Deeply own aspects of our infrastructure at Intercom and autonomously executing on high impact projects - including writing application code, automating systems, improving observability and low-level tuning of datastores used in production, test and development across Intercom.
- Value agility and simplicity, just as you prioritise scalability and uptime. Our continuous deployment approach ensures focus on gradual improvements. Major accomplishments are introduced incrementally, staying under the radar with feature flags.
- Contribute to all phases of software development including ideation, prototyping, design and implementation. This role has a mix of both hands-on development as well as strategic work and enablement.
- Play an active role in the hiring, mentoring, and career development of other engineers.
- Raise the bar for technical standards, performance, reliability, and operational excellence across Intercom.
What skills do I need?
- Excellent pragmatic engineering and decision making skills in a high stakes environment.
- 8+ years experience in a production environment, with significant contributions to the design, architecture, and optimisation of distributed systems.
- Expertise in backend technologies such as MySQL, Elasticsearch, Memcached, as well as Linux, with demonstrated capability to innovate and optimise at the system level.
- Ideally, you’ve supported scaling a SaaS product in a previous role and loved the satisfaction that comes with knowing that people around the world are using something you’ve created.
- Significant, demonstrated impact that your work has had on the product and/or the teams you worked with.
- Proficient with standard software engineering methodologies, e.g. unit testing, object-oriented design, data structures, code reviews, design documentation, and utilising observability tooling.
- Deep understanding of modern web applications and distributed systems, with the ability to lead complex technical discussions and drive decisions among stakeholders.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity in a fast-growing start-up
- We serve lunch every weekday, plus a variety of snack foods and a fully stocked kitchen
- Regular compensation reviews - we reward great work!
- Pension scheme & match up to 4%
- Peace of mind with life assurance, as well as comprehensive health and dental insurance for you and your dependents
- Flexible paid time off policy
- Paid maternity leave, as well as 6 weeks paternity leave for fathers, to let you spend valuable time with your loved ones
- If you’re cycling, we’ve got you covered on the Cycle-to-Work Scheme. With secure bike storage too
- MacBooks are our standard, but we also offer Windows for certain roles when needed.
Policies
Intercom has a hybrid working policy. We believe that working in person helps us stay connected, collaborate easier and create a great culture while still providing flexibility to work from home. We expect employees to be in the office at least two days per week.
We have a radically open and accepting culture at Intercom. We avoid spending time on divisive subjects to foster a safe and cohesive work environment for everyone. As an organization, our policy is to not advocate on behalf of the company or our employees on any social or political topics out of our internal or external communications. We respect personal opinion and expression on these topics on personal social platforms on personal time, and do not challenge or confront anyone for their views on non-work related topics. Our goal is to focus on doing incredible work to achieve our goals and unite the company through our core values.
Intercom values diversity and is committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity. Intercom will not discriminate against an applicant or employee on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, gender, age, physical or mental disability, veteran or military status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law.
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Top Skills
What We Do
Intercom is the next generation customer service platform, built for an AI-first world. Intercom is the only platform that combines an AI Bot + AI Help Desk + Proactive Support tools into one seamless platform.
Founded in 2011 and backed by leading venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer Venture Partners and Social Capital, Intercom is on a mission to make internet business personal.
Our products are great to sell, because they're loved by our customers. We received a “Top Rated” for Live Chat on Trustradius, and we’re a Top 50 product for Small Businesses on G2 - we think these awards speak for themselves.
Why Work With Us
We're a more established company that still feels like a start-up environment. We operate and innovate quickly. Employees have the opportunity to take big bets, make signficiant impact, and advance in their careers.
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