Senior Engineering Manager - Datastores
Intercom
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 an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the team that enables the core technologies that Intercom is built on. This is for you if you are passionate about guiding a lean, high autonomy team to build and scale systems on technologies such as MySQL, Elasticsearch, and DynamoDB, owning how they operate - from low-level systems engineering to all parts of our Rails monolith.
Our team’s mission is to accelerate Intercom’s growth and stability through educated and operationally excellent core technology usage. We help product engineers build simpler, more performant products - faster. This includes 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 build patterns. A current project is evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure by moving to PlanetScale with a previous example being creating mechanisms to migrate Elasticsearch indexes for scale and profit. Every interaction runs on the infrastructure we enable and manage, that’s millions of database queries per second, hundreds of terabytes of data, and tens of millions of cache hits per second.
We’re building a robust platform where your strategic leadership will contribute to areas such as building a beautiful Messenger, an efficient teammate experience, and a secure-by-default system - all while scaling the platform to billions of users and shipping hundreds of new versions of Intercom to production every day.
Discover our engineering culture at intercom.engineering and explore our engineering values.
What will I be doing? 🚀
- Lead and inspire a high-performing, autonomous team of exceptional engineers working on scaling and optimising our core datastore infrastructure and supporting systems. The median tenure of the team is seven years - we love our roles.
- Navigate complex scaling challenges, guiding the team through strategic decisions on our core technology usage and expansion.
- Collaborate closely with domain experts and other parts of R&D, being trusted and sought for your deep domain expertise.
- Drive strategic initiatives and execute high-impact projects, ensuring they are delivered reliably and efficiently.
- Foster a culture of agility and simplicity, prioritising scalability and uptime while supporting continuous deployment and incremental improvements.
- Mentor and coach engineers and future leaders, playing an active role in their hiring, onboarding, and career development.
- Adapt and thrive across various functions to ensure objectives are met, often stepping well beyond traditional boundaries to drive results.
What skills do I need? 📖
We recognise that sometimes these lists can appear as strict requirements, but that’s not the case. Even if you feel you have a subset of the experience below and are passionate about this shape of role - that’s ok, we’d love to talk to you!
- Proven experience as a Senior Engineering Manager, trusted with autonomy over outcomes of a team with deep context or multiple teams.
- Demonstrated expertise in backend technologies such as MySQL, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Linux.
- Track record of independently leading and delivering on complex initiatives, often spanning multiple projects and teams.
- Proficiency with standard software engineering methodologies and a deep understanding of modern web applications and distributed systems with the ability to quickly articulate technical challenges and solutions.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across teams and stakeholders.
- Ability to learn quickly, iterate, unblock yourself and your team, and persist until the right problem is solved.
How will I be supported?
- You will buddy with another manager who will help you to onboard and get up to speed quickly.
- You will have a close group of management peers to collaborate with and learn from.
- We invest heavily in our Managers, supporting individual career development through training and coaching
Benefits 😍
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
- 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’re happy to get you whatever equipment helps you get your job done
#LI-Hybrid
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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