Principal Engineer, Fin AI Agent

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.

• 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.

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.