Staff Core Technologies Engineer, Intercom
Plus equity
2+ days a week in office
The modern customer communications platform
Open for applications
The modern customer communications platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
Plus equity
2+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
Intercom's mission is to make internet business personal.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the team that enables the core technologies that Intercom is built on
- 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
- 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
Our take
If you've ever seen a chat pop up on a business' website, it was probably provided by Intercom. Though ubiquitous now, it used to be a major challenge for companies to communicate swiftly with their customers. Intercom's Messenger allows a company to instantly reach out with human or automated support, improving customer service and greatly increasing conversion rates for sales.
While the Messenger is its most visible product, Intercom provides a service similar to Salesforce, as an advanced customer relationship management system. However, Intercom doesn't see Salesforce as a major rival, as Intercom specialises in the online market while Salesforce is more suited for traditional retail. Intercom is used by more than 25,000 businesses including Amazon, Meta and Atlassian, and reaches an estimated 600 million end users monthly.
Intercom has primarily served the US and Irish markets but has been expanding its presence globally in recent years. Despite having a commanding market position, it is continuing to develop its product, most recently delivering a major functionality upgrade to its Messenger software, greatly increasing its ability to carry out ticketed support requests.
Freddie
Company Specialist
Insights
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
41% female employees
-7% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Mar 2018
$125m
SERIES D
Apr 2016
$50m
SERIES C
Total funding: $240.8m
Company benefits
- We serve lunch every weekday, plus a variety of snack foods and a fully stocked kitchen
- Generous public transport allowance for commuting
- Wellness programme that allows you to expense gym and other sports activities up to £90 quarterly
- Paid maternity leave, as well as 6 weeks paternity leave for fathers, to let you spend valuable time with your loved ones
- Open vacation policy and flexible holidays so you can take time off when you need
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Peace of mind with life assurance, as well as comprehensive health and dental insurance for you and your dependents
- Regular compensation reviews - we reward great work
- MacBooks are our standard, but we’re happy to get you whatever equipment helps you get your job done
Company values
- We're optimistic & positive
- We obsess about our customers' success
- We're confident, yet humble
- We think big and start small
- We go further together
- Make every day count
Company HQ
Financial District, San Francisco, CA
Articles
Leadership
Eoghan McCabe
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously CEO of Contrast and Exceptional. Is also the Chairman of Intercom.
Des Traynor
(Co-founder & CSO)Previously worked in software development and is an expert in User Experience (has lectured on the topic and was UX Lead at Contrast)
Ciaran Lee
(Co-founder)Previously Lead Engineer at RateMyArea.com and CTO of Exceptional. Was Intercom's CTO until 2021.
People progressing
Joined as a Manager in Product Analytics. Made it to VP of Research & Data Science after 6 years and 3 promotions
Salary benchmarks
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