Staff AI Designer

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. Founded in 2011 and trusted by nearly 30,000 global businesses, Intercom is setting the new standard for customer service.

Role Overview

We’re looking for a Staff AI Product Designer to shape what our AI does, how it behaves, and how it fits into real user workflows. This role sits at the intersection of product, design, and machine learning—turning emerging capabilities into reliable, high-quality user experiences. You’ll design systems: behaviors, decisions, orchestration, and end-to-end experiences powered by AI. This is not a traditional product design role.

What You’ll Do

• Define AI capabilities (the what and why): Identify and pattern match high-value opportunities for AI across the product. Define what AI should do—and just as importantly, what it should not do, making hard or unpopular calls when needed. Set clear boundaries for autonomy vs human control.
• Design AI behavior, orchestration, and system logic: Architect AI-driven workflows and agentic systems that operate across real-world scenarios and over time, including multi-step and agent-to-agent interactions. Establish decision frameworks: when systems should act, ask, elevate, or defer. Design for uncertainty, failures, and edge cases as core system behavior.
• Shape human + AI workflows and end-to-end experience: Design experiences for users who are increasingly managing AI systems and agents. Design how AI integrates into real user workflows, not just isolated interactions. Define the role of the human in the loop: where users guide, review, or override. Ensure users can understand, trust, and recover from system failures.
• Define quality, evaluation, and reliability: Define what good looks like (trust, accuracy, effort reduction, and whether outputs are structured and usable in context). Design evaluation scenarios and feedback loops. Analyze outputs to identify failure modes and system weaknesses.

How You’ll Work

• Shape direction from the earliest stages of zero-to-one problems. Influence across teams without formal authority. Operate in a highly autonomous, fast-moving environment with evolving constraints.
• Lead ambiguous, in-flight work—making calls on when to adapt the product vs. push on system improvements as things evolve. Act as a bridge between AI research, technical capabilities, and user needs.
• Collaborate deeply with ML scientists, PMs, and product designers. Prototype and run focused experiments that isolate variables and generate clear insights.
• Stay close to system behaviour by regularly reviewing outputs and raising the bar on quality.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong product judgment—you consistently make high-quality calls on what to build and why.
• Ability to influence without authority.
• Experience working on zero-to-one products and comfort operating through ambiguity and rapid change.
• Deep understanding of LLMs and their limitations, along with a grounding in traditional ML approaches and when to use them instead.
• High standards for quality, with a track record of identifying where AI systems break down in real-world use.
• A scientific mindset—you can design experiments that isolate variables and produce meaningful insights.
• Systems thinker: you’re happier designing behaviours and flows than polishing interfaces.

What This Role Is Not

• You will not be training models or building ML infrastructure.
• You will not be responsible for backend architecture or performance optimisation.
• You will only occasionally design UI—this is not the focus of the role.

Why This Role Is Compelling

You’ll join a mature AI discipline operating at the frontier. Intercom already has an established AI Design team and strong cross-functional understanding of this role, so you can focus on building rather than justifying your value. You won’t be adding AI to a product. The quality of our AI is the quality of our product. This is a technical, hands-on role where you have the satisfaction of working with tight feedback loops. You’ll shape product direction, not just execution. You’ll operate upstream in a high-autonomy environment with real ownership over outcomes.

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.
• Unlimited access to Claude Code and best-in-class AI tools; experimentation & building is encouraged & celebrated.
• 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.

Fin 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. Fin values diversity and is committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity.