Principal Engineer, Fin AI Agent

Intercom is the AI Customer Service company on a mission to help businesses provide incredible customer experiences.

Our AI agent Fin, the most advanced customer service AI agent on the market, lets businesses deliver always-on, impeccable customer service and ultimately transform their customer experiences for the better. Fin can also be combined with our Helpdesk to become a complete solution called the Intercom Customer Service Suite, which provides AI enhanced support for the more complex or high touch queries that require a human agent.

Founded in 2011 and trusted by nearly 30,000 global businesses, Intercom is setting the new standard for customer service. Driven by our core values, we push boundaries, build with speed and intensity, and consistently deliver incredible value to our customers.

What's the opportunity?

Fin is the #1 AI agent for customer service. It resolves over 1M customer conversations every week, and we're just getting started. We're on the cutting edge of defining how AI agents should work — inventing paradigms that didn't exist six months ago and discovering entirely new problem spaces every time we push the technology further.

This role sits at the heart of the Service Agent pillar — 12 teams and growing, building every capability that makes Fin work. You'll partner at the strategic pillar level: broad context across work streams, deep technical understanding of how Fin operates end-to-end, and the autonomy to decide where you need to go next. When we need a new work stream spun up from scratch — a brand new team, an ambiguous problem space, aggressive timelines — you're the person who makes that happen.

The competitive landscape is intense. Fast-moving AI-native startups are coming hard for this space, shipping aggressively and going after the same deals we are. We need someone who thrives under that pressure, who can maintain technical excellence while moving at startup speed within a company that has the resources and customer base to make that speed count.

What will you do?

• Partner at the strategic pillar level. You'll have broad context across work streams and use that to inform technical strategy and investment priorities. What should we care about? Where should we invest? Where do you need to step in? These are your decisions.

• Spin up 0-to-1 work streams. Bring together engineers who've never worked as a team, disambiguate the problem space, build momentum under aggressive timelines, set high expectations, and drive execution.

• Execute on the most ambiguous, highest-stakes problems. You're hands-on. You write code, you ship features, you're deep in the weeds. We've seen too many Principal Engineers who are brilliant but too far from execution to be effective here.

• Lead experimental work at the AI frontier. Run your own A/B tests, do prompt engineering, build evals, and calibrate accuracy, cost, and latency for LLM-powered features. Much of what we're building are new paradigms for customer-facing software.

• Shape long-term technical strategy through execution. Your hands-on work informs the architecture. You're simultaneously building and thinking about what needs to change about how we build products — data models, system design, the shift from GUI-first to agent-first interfaces.

• Work across the full stack in an AI-first development environment. Every engineer has Claude Code with unlimited tokens and a sophisticated ecosystem of MCP servers, skills, and shared context. You'll push the boundaries of what's possible with AI-assisted development and help shape how the entire engineering org works.

• Raise the bar for the people around you. Give direct, actionable feedback that changes outcomes. We don't need someone who mentors juniors on the basics — we need someone who can accelerate and grow the senior and staff engineers around them.

What are we looking for?

The core requirement: engineering depth and product thinking. We need someone who combines deep engineering ability with strong product and design instincts — not one or the other. We don't want engineers who are technically brilliant but disconnected from the product. And we don't want product-minded engineers who have great instincts but can't execute at the level this work demands. You need to be able to both build complex systems AND identify the right problems to solve. This is the single most important dimension we evaluate on.

Beyond that:

• Operated at real scale and has builder energy. You've likely spent time at companies operating at significant scale — the kind of environment where you've seen what large-scale distributed systems actually look like in production. But you also have startup DNA: urgency, resourcefulness, a bias toward building over discussing.

• AI fluency. You're actively experimenting with AI-assisted development, pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and forming opinions about how it changes the way teams build software. This matters more than any speci