Senior Director, Engineering

Senior Director, Engineering

Berlin, Germany

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. Driven by our core values, we push boundaries, build with speed and intensity, and consistently deliver incredible value to our customers.

The World's First Customer Platform Helping Internet Businesses Accelerate Growth

Intercom builds a suite of messaging-first products that all modern internet businesses can use to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle, from acquisition, to engagement, and support. Today more than 25,000 businesses, including New Relic, Sotheby's, and Shopify, use Intercom to connect with a billion unique people worldwide.

Intercom is a deeply creative company with the confidence to believe it can fundamentally change the future of internet business. Our people are incredibly ambitious, yet humble. Warm, accepting, and positive. Whether you build, market, sell or support product, we want you to make your mark with us.

What's The Opportunity?

Intercom is on an extraordinary trajectory. We've grown from a $318M to a nearly $400M business in a single year, and our AI agent Fin is the world's best CX agent. We're not slowing down. We're building a full stack AI company and a product for an AI first world.

To fuel this next chapter, we're establishing a major new R&D hub in Berlin — our first significant R&D presence in continental Europe. Berlin will become a core pillar of Intercom's R&D organization, and we're hiring a Senior Director of Engineering to be its founding R&D leader.

This is a rare opportunity to build something from the ground up at a company with real scale, real revenue, and real ambition. You will be the senior engineering leader in Berlin, responsible for standing up and scaling a world-class R&D organization. You'll shape the culture, establish the operating rhythm, and ensure Berlin teams are fully integrated into Intercom's strategy from day one.

You will report to the VP of Engineering and operate as a member of the R&D leadership team, partnering closely with your peers in Dublin and London. This role carries significant strategic weight — you will help define how Intercom builds and ships product across a multi-site, globally distributed R&D organization.

What Will I Be Doing?

Building and Leading the Berlin R&D Hub

• Serving as the site lead and senior R&D leader in Berlin, setting the tone for R&D excellence, culture, and pace
• Hiring and developing a team who embody Intercom's values and move with impatience
• Establishing Berlin's operating rhythm — onboarding, team formation, and cross-location collaboration practices that ensure new hires are productive and connected from week one

Driving Strategy and Execution

• Owning one or more areas of ownership within Intercom's product
• Being accountable for delivering real impact for our customers
• Partnering with Product and Design leadership to shape strategy and deliver to a high bar
• Leading the definition and execution of key strategic initiatives across R&D and Intercom more broadly

Cultivating a High-Performance Culture

• You are excited about the AI future, constantly learning and pushing yourself and others to understand what new boundaries can be pushed. You want to instill the same beliefs into your teams so that they can achieve far more than in the past.
• Creating an environment of urgency, accountability, and continuous improvement where teams do the best work of their careers
• Coaching, mentoring, and developing some of the most talented engineers in the industry, ensuring every individual is set up for growth and impact
• Defining what an AI forward organization looks like and how it operates

Operating as a Cross-Site Leader

• Functioning as a full member of the R&D leadership team, contributing to company-wide strategy and operational decisions
• Ensuring seamless collaboration between Berlin and Intercom's existing engineering hubs in Dublin and London
• Driving organization-level improvements to how Intercom builds, ships, and operates

What Skills Do I Need?

• You have deep technical knowledge and a proven track record of building and leading large, high-performing engineering organizations (100+ engineers) that ship world-class products
• You have experience as a senior engineering leader (Director+ level) at a high-growth technology company, ideally in SaaS or enterprise software
• You have stood up or significantly scaled an engineering site or hub before — you understand what it takes to build culture, hire at pace, and establish credibility in a new market
• Leadership and mentorship are core to who you are. You have a track record of developing engineering talent and building organizations where people do career-defining work
• You take ownership of everything in your domain — from strategic direction to operational details — and drive it to a high-quality conclusion
• You thrive in fast-paced, high-ambition environments. You are energized by intensity and urgency, and you bring that energy to your teams
• You have driven significant organization-level improvements to engineering practices, processes, or culture in previous roles
• You are a collaborative, cross-functional leader who partners effectively with Product, Design, and other engineering leaders to deliver customer outcomes
• You are based in or willing to relocate to Berlin, and you are excited about building Intercom's presence in the Berlin tech ecosystem

Bonus Skills & Attributes

• Experience with AI/ML products or AI-first product development
• Experience in customer support, helpdesk, or conversational AI product spaces
• You're opinionated about the work that you do, and you stand up for something you believe in
• You're humble and honest, you know your strengths, but also your weaknesses. Setting up your environment to optimize for this knowledge comes naturally to you

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, annual bonus and equity
• Regular compensation reviews - we reward great work!
• Generous paid time off above statutory minimum
• Hybrid working
• MacBooks are our standard, but we also offer Windows for certain roles when needed.
• Fun events for employees, friends, and family!

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 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