Senior/ Staff Software Engineer, Data Infrastructure

Are You Ready to Define the Future of Data at Scale?

The volume and velocity of data at Intercom are exploding, fueled by our growth and our drive to integrate more sophisticated, AI-assisted data solutions.

The Data Infrastructure team is the engine room for this future. We don't just maintain systems; we build the distributed foundations that empower every Intercom team—from Product to Research—to turn raw information into actionable intelligence. We are seeking a seasoned Senior+ Data Infrastructure Engineer to step up, take ownership of critical initiatives, and ensure our data platform is rock-solid, scalable, and future-proof.

What You’ll Be Building & Owning

This role is about impact and ownership. You will be at the forefront of designing and evolving the core infrastructure that powers our entire data ecosystem.

• Next-Gen Platform Evolution: Partner with product and business teams and lead the architectural design and implementation of the next generation of our data stack, ensuring it can meet the demands of advanced analytics and AI applications.
• Enable AI-powered internal applications: Teams use our platform to build AI-assisted insights tools, operational workflows, and internal data apps in Streamlit, React, and Python. You’ll help define the interfaces, semantics, and data access patterns that power these experiences.
• Operate and improve core data systems.: You’ll keep our pipelines, orchestration, and warehouse running reliably for demanding internal users — AI, Product, Finance, GTM, Analytics Engineering, and more — while continuously improving performance, cost-efficiency, and resilience.
• Enablement Through Tooling: Partner closely with Analytics Engineers, Analysts, and Data Scientists to build the self-service tooling and infrastructure they need to move fast and deploy safely. You’ll build tooling, patterns, guardrails, and diagnostics that make teams self-serve, reduce friction, and prevent Data Infra from becoming a bottleneck.
• Data Quality Guardianship: Implement advanced monitoring systems to proactively detect, surface, and resolve data quality issues across our high-throughput environment (where dozens of changes can ship daily).
• Driving Automation: Develop automation and tooling that streamlines the creation and discovery of high-quality analytics data, making the entire data lifecycle more efficient.

The Strategic Impact You'll Drive

To put things in context, here are examples of the strategic, company-shaping initiatives you will be expected to own and drive as a Senior+ Data Infrastructure Engineer:

• Platform & Warehousing Strategy: Lead the architectural- and cost review and revamp of our core data infrastructure and to ensure it can scale exponentially for future growth and advanced use cases.
• Conversational BI Strategy: Architect the semantic layer and LLM-integration pipelines required to enable Natural Language Querying (NLQ) over our data warehouse, shifting away from complex, technical reporting to make data truly democratized and accessible, users should be able to query information—getting both raw numbers and contextual narratives instantly—without needing a data science degree or waiting on analysts. 
• Community of Practice & Mentorship: Act as a technical thought leader. Foster and grow our internal data community by establishing best practices, mentoring technical peers across the company, coaching on complex pipeline development, and ensuring our engineering bar remains high.

Recent Wins You'll Build Upon:

• AI-assisted Local Analytics Development Environment for Airflow and DBT.
• Data-rich AI apps containerized on Snowflake SPCS.
• A new, modern data catalog solution
• Migrating critical MySQL ingestion pipelines from Aurora to PlanetScale.

Who You Are 

You are a builder, a problem-solver, and a force multiplier who thrives on providing the solid, high-quality foundations that others build upon.

The Hats You will wear:

• The Senior: You have a proven, full-time career history in the data space, with deep fluency in both Python and SQL. You’ve owned a significant data or distributed system in production, used by multiple teams.
• The Pipeline Veteran: You have hands-on experience building and running data pipeline frameworks for large, complex datasets.
• The Owner / Business Partner: You care about impact: making teams faster, removing bottlenecks, reducing cost, improving reliability. You understand the why, not just the what: the business context behind migrations, platform changes, and architectural decisions.
• The Security Engineer: You possess a solid understanding of data security- and compliance best practices and approach every task with a strong sense of data privacy.
• The Navigator: You thrive in environments where you’re expected to show impatience with slow processes, unclear ownership, and repeated manual work. You handle ambiguity well — you can start from a vague problem and shape it into a clear plan.
• The Architect & The Implementer: You can articulate the significant technical and team-level impact of your past work, and you excel at breaking down massive, ambiguous challenges into clear, actionable steps. You’re pragmatic: you choose the right abstraction, not the fanciest one; you know when to build and when to adopt.
• A Leader & Mentor: You naturally recognize opportunities to step back and mentor others, understanding when your guidance will multiply the team's output more than your direct code contribution. You’ve built tooling or standards that changed how other engineers or analysts worked.
• The Craftsman: You are fundamentally a builder who cares deeply about the quality and longevity of the systems you create.

Bonus Points (Our Modern Stack Knowledge):

• Airflow at Scale: Extensive experience working with Apache Airflow, especially the nuances of operating it reliably in a high-volume environment.
• Embracing AI: Genuine interest, and utilisation experience of various AI tools.
• Modern Data Stack Fluency: Familiarity with tools like Snowflake and DBT.
• Future-Focused: You keep a keen eye on industry trends and emerging technologies, always thinking about what's next.

Next Steps

If you are passionate about designing resilient analytics infrastructure that scales with a high-growth, global product, we encourage you to apply!

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
• Open vacation policy and flexible holidays so you can take time off when you need it
• 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.