Senior Engineering Manager - AI Core Platform in London

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.

What’s the opportunity? We’re hiring a Senior Engineering Manager for the Core Platform team in the AI Group. The AI Platform team builds and operates the foundational infrastructure that powers Intercom’s AI products, including developer tooling, inference infrastructure, and reliability systems. The team ensures that engineers and scientists can rapidly & safely build our flagship AI product Fin, while also ensuring it remains stable and performant in production. This is a hands-on EM role — you’ll lead a senior-heavy team of 4–6 engineers while remaining hands-on in the codebase. We believe that an EM who occasionally works alongside ICs writing code will build up the knowledge and context required to inform strategic decision making and better support engineers in their team. This isn’t a temporary “player-coach” setup — it’s a deeply technical leadership role where coding and architecture work are core to the job. This is a fantastic opportunity for an experienced engineering manager without prior AI experience to step directly into the world of AI systems. You’ll learn what it takes to run AI-powered production systems, and shape the platform that enables fast, safe, and reliable iteration on cutting-edge AI products.

• Lead a high-performing team building the platform and infrastructure that power Intercom’s AI capabilities.
• Contribute directly to production code, staying close to the work and building knowledge & context through first-hand experience.
• Support teams of ML Scientists and Engineers building AI powered capabilities.
• Plan, prioritise, and deliver high-impact roadmaps in partnership with the team’s most senior engineers, balancing delivery, quality, and innovation.
• Improve developer experience across the AI infrastructure stack, ensuring that systems are observable, scalable, and easy to build upon.
• Empower the engineers on the team to act with agency and maximise their impact.
• Expand your scope over time, potentially taking ownership of additional platform domains as the team and AI initiatives grow.

What skills do I need?

• Experience leading engineering teams, ideally across infrastructure or platform domains.
• Recent hands-on coding experience — you’ve shipped production code in the last couple of years.
• Strong technical judgement and the ability to coach senior engineers through complex architectural trade-offs.
• Adaptable leadership style suited to a group that will grow quickly, and change shape over time.
• Curiosity and enthusiasm for AI, with a desire to learn how ML systems are developed and operated in production.

• Previous experience in hands-on EM/IC role.
• You’ve alternated between EM and IC roles during your career.
• Previous experience building AI powered products or platforms.

We are a well-treated bunch, with awesome benefits! If there’s something important to you that’s not on this list, talk to us!

• 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.
• 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.

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 three 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.