Principal Engineer, Fin AI Agent

About the role

This role sits at the heart of the Service Agent pillar — 12 teams and growing, building every capability that makes Fin work. You'll partner at the strategic pillar level with broad context across work streams, deep technical understanding of how Fin operates end-to-end, and the autonomy to decide where you need to go next.

What you'll do

• Partner at the strategic pillar level. You'll have broad context across work streams and use that to inform technical strategy and investment priorities.
• Spin up 0-to-1 work streams. Bring together engineers who've never worked as a team, disambiguate the problem space, build momentum under aggressive timelines, set high expectations, and drive execution.
• Execute on the most ambiguous, highest-stakes problems. You're hands-on. You write code, you ship features, you're deep in the weeds.
• Lead experimental work at the AI frontier. Run your own A/B tests, do prompt engineering, build evals, and calibrate accuracy, cost, and latency for LLM-powered features.
• Shape long-term technical strategy through execution. Your hands-on work informs the architecture.
• Work across the full stack in an AI-first development environment. Every engineer has Claude Code with unlimited tokens and a sophisticated ecosystem of MCP servers, skills, and shared context.
• Raise the bar for the people around you. Give direct, actionable feedback that changes outcomes.

What you'll need

• Engineering depth and product thinking. Deep engineering ability with strong product and design instincts.
• Operated at real scale and has builder energy. Experience at companies operating at significant scale with startup DNA: urgency, resourcefulness, a bias toward building over discussing.
• AI fluency. Actively experimenting with AI-assisted development, pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and forming opinions about how it changes the way teams build software.
• Deep technical depth with breadth. Can go deep into the weeds on at least one technical domain, but also navigate complex multi-team systems with ease.
• Communication as a superpower. Can explain to leadership why a technical investment matters, align multiple teams around a complex project.
• Extreme autonomy. Partner with the Engineering Director on where you think the pillar needs to go next. You identify problems, form convictions, and act on them.
• Critical thinking about the business. Understand what Intercom is optimizing for and translate that into technical decisions.
• At least ~10+ years of experience, with significant time as a technical leader driving complex projects across multiple teams and stakeholders.