Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

What's the opportunity? 

Intercom is the AI Customer Service company on a mission to help businesses provide incredible customer experiences. Our AI agent Fin is the most advanced customer service AI on the market, allowing businesses to deliver always-on, perfect customer support.

We are seeking a commercially-minded engineering leader to lead our Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) New Business team in EMEA. This role is pivotal in helping Intercom scale its AI-first platform to the world’s most complex organisations.

You will own both the technical execution and the business value outcomes, ensuring that our high-stakes deployments result in tangible success for our customers.

About this role

This role is both strategic and hands-on. You will lead a Forward Deployed Engineering team that focuses on winning complex, large deals and navigating ambiguous customer engagements.

Unlike traditional engineering management roles, this position demands high commercial fluency and a tight feedback loop with our R&D teams. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions and Product to not only deliver customer transformation but also to translate field experience into sharp, actionable feedback that shapes our roadmap.

This is a hands-on EM role — you’ll lead a team while remaining hands-on. We believe that an EM who occasionally works alongside ICs, actively engaging in strategic deals, will build up the knowledge and context required to inform strategic decision making and better support engineers in their team. This isn’t a temporary “player-coach” setup — it’s a deeply technical leadership role where technical guidance, architecture, demos, and product evaluation support are core to the job.

This is a fantastic opportunity for an experienced engineering manager without prior Forward Deployed Engineering experience to step directly into the world of AI customer service. You’ll learn what it takes to run enterprise deployments, and create leverage for Intercom and our customers.

What will I be doing? 

As a hands-on leader, you will:

• Lead, coach, and nurture a high-performing FDE team while operating under pressure in high-stakes customer engagements.
• Own end-to-end outcomes through clarity in communication, speed of execution, tight coordination, and technical quality.
• Operate as a player-coach, actively engaging in strategic deals while developing team capabilities. We value leaders who are in the details, and “show, not tell”.
• Lead discovery, design, and delivery of tailored technical solutions, including PoCs, evaluations and business value assessments.
• Champion a customer-obsessed culture, noticing early indicators of success or failure in customer engagements and raising and correcting them with urgency.
• Support opportunities with technical guidance, architecture, demos, and product evaluation support, as well as sales expertise.
• Contribute to codifying successful deployments into reusable tools, playbooks, and inputs to the product roadmap, and create leverage for Intercom and our customers.
• Expand your scope over time, potentially supporting complex, seven-figure opportunities and representing Intercom and the FDE function externally through executive meetings and strategic events.

What skills do I need? 

• 3+ years of technical experience in roles such as Software Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Architect, Applied AI or related technical roles.
• Having 2+ years of experience leading technical customer-facing teams, with a proven track record of mentoring and managing high-performing teams.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to coach engineers through complex architectural trade-offs.
• Comfortable with a problem space that is ambiguous in nature, and capable of translating that ambiguity into clear signals for Product and Engineering and for positive customer outcomes.
• Ability to flex working hours to partner with global teams.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.

Bonus skills & attributes 

• Experience selling and deploying AI, data, or highly technical products in complex enterprise environments.
• Curiosity and enthusiasm for AI, with a desire to learn how ML systems are developed and operated in production.
• Experience hiring and managing high-performing teams.

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 also offer Windows for certain roles when needed.

#LI-Hybrid