Staff Core Technologies Engineer

What’s the opportunity?

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the team that enables the core technologies that Intercom is built on. This is for you if you are passionate about building and scaling systems such as MySQL, ElasticSearch, ingestion pipelines, and owning how they operate from low level systems engineering to all parts of our Rails and Python monoliths.

Our team’s mission is to accelerate Intercom’s growth and stability through educated and operationally excellent core technology usage. This means that we’re here to help product engineers and ML scientists build simpler, more performant product - faster. This can be through things like 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 our build patterns. Previous projects from the team include future-proofing our databases through sharding and building a mechanism to migrate Elasticsearch indexes for scale and profit.

We’re building a robust platform where your expertise will be applied to areas such as building a beautiful Messenger, an efficient teammate experience, a secure by default system, all while scaling the platform to billions of users and shipping two hundred new versions of Intercom to production every day.

Delve deeper into our engineering culture at intercom.engineering and explore our engineering values.

What will I be doing?

• Collaborate with world-class domain experts to shape our technical direction and infrastructure as we grow.
• Deeply own aspects of our infrastructure at Intercom and autonomously executing on high impact projects - including writing application code, automating systems, improving observability and low-level tuning of datastores used in production, test and development across Intercom.
• Value agility and simplicity, just as you prioritise scalability and uptime. Our continuous deployment approach ensures focus on gradual improvements. Major accomplishments are introduced incrementally, staying under the radar with feature flags.
• Contribute to all phases of software development including ideation, prototyping, design and implementation. This role has a mix of both hands-on development as well as strategic work and enablement.
• Play an active role in the hiring, mentoring, and career development of other engineers.
• Raise the bar for technical standards, performance, reliability, and operational excellence across Intercom.

What skills do I need?

• Excellent pragmatic engineering and decision making skills in a high stakes environment.
• 8+ years experience in a production environment, with significant contributions to the design, architecture, and optimisation of distributed systems.
• Expertise in backend technologies such as MySQL, Elasticsearch, Memcached, as well as Linux, with demonstrated capability to innovate and optimise at the system level.
• Ideally, you’ve supported scaling a SaaS product in a previous role and loved the satisfaction that comes with knowing that people around the world are using something you’ve created.
• Significant, demonstrated impact that your work has had on the product and/or the teams you worked with.
• Proficient with standard software engineering methodologies, e.g. unit testing, object-oriented design, data structures, code reviews, design documentation, and utilising observability tooling.
• Deep understanding of modern web applications and distributed systems, with the ability to lead complex technical discussions and drive decisions among stakeholders.

Benefits