Senior Engineering Manager - Datastores

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 distribu