Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Location: London, England
Department: R&D
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.
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!
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Competitive salary and equity in a fast-growing start-up
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We serve lunch every weekday, plus a variety of snack foods and a fully stocked kitchen
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Regular compensation reviews - we reward great work!
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Pension scheme & match up to 4%
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Peace of mind with life assurance, as well as comprehensive health and dental insurance for you and your dependents
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Flexible paid time off policy
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Paid maternity leave, as well as 6 weeks paternity leave for fathers, to let you spend valuable time with your loved ones
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If you’re cycling, we’ve got you covered on the Cycle-to-Work Scheme. With secure bike storage too
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MacBooks are our standard, but we also offer Windows for certain roles when needed.
#LI-Hybrid
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 disability, veteran or military status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law.
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