Irish technology firm Intercom is to expand its workfoce, doubling its global staff numbers over the next 18 months, with 150 roles being assigned to Dublin. The majority of the new hires will be in the engineering sector. The company employs just shy of 230 people, and almost 100 of them are engineers.
'New levels of automation and intelligence'
"We are laser focused on driving breakthrough innovations which help our customers grow their businesses efficiently," Intercom's Karen Peacock said. "Over the past year we have introduced new products, like our bot Operator and our live chat solution for sales and marketing teams, and new levels of automation and intelligence to help do this.
"We are doubling the size of the Product teams at Intercom over the next 18 months. When we talk about 'product', we mean engineering, design, product management, research and analytics.
350 new hires mainly in Dublin, San Francisco and London
"That means we’ll be hiring 350 people over the next 18 months across our offices in San Francisco, Dublin, London, Chicago and Sydney." That will bring the total number of staff globally from 464 now to more than 800 in the next year and a half.
"The majority of our new team members will be focused on product, which is built in Dublin, San Francisco and London.
“We’ve gone from four to almost 470 people in six years,” he said. “Our appetite to build product is what has fuelled this.”
The Dublin office and new roles
"In Dublin we have our product teams, our Platform team, and our Foundations team," Peacock said. "We have attracted some of the best talent in the world here, which in turn created a unique engineering culture full of heart and hustle, probably best summarised by Darragh’s
Shipping is your company’s heartbeat article.
"We have attracted top talent from great companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and HubSpot (by the way, just to answer one of our most commonly asked questions, yes, we support relocations to Dublin!)," Peacock said. "Paul
recently published this article on why product people choose Intercom over other companies.
"Our Dublin team is led by our co-founders Des Traynor (our chief strategy officer) and Ciaran Lee (our chief technology officer), along with Paul Adams, leading product management, design and research, and Darragh Curran, leading engineering.
'Vision and passion have been catalyst for much of what Intercom is today
"Paul needs no introduction for most of you reading this. His vision and passion have been the catalyst for much of what Intercom is today. Previously Paul was the global head of brand design at Facebook, led product teams at Facebook, and worked in UX at Google, where he worked on Gmail, YouTube and mobile.
"Darragh also needs no introduction for most of you. He has led Intercom engineering for the past 5 years and has grown and scaled our products to where they are today. Darragh joined Intercom from Amazon where he learned a thing or two about building great companies and building to scale.
"We are looking for the best talent in Europe to join our team and work with us to solve important customer problems. Interested?
Check out our Dublin opportunities here.
Intercom has raised about $115 million in various funding rounds, with the most recent being $50 million in a series C round in 2016. About 25,000 businesses use Intercom, tracking more than a billion people worldwide.
'Huge appetite to build a lot more software
“We have a huge appetite to build a lot more software,” said Des Traynor, chief strategy officer with Intercom told 'The Irish Times'.
“We say our mission is to make internet business personal,” said Traynor. “What we mean is we want to move it away from this transactional world where everyone is having different conversations through different silos with a different customer view.
"It’s not because the business doesn’t care, it’s that the tools don’t allow this empathy or this customer context. That’s what Intercom does.
“We really think that the future of communication for business is more like the past than it is the present. We’re in this weird anomaly where we raced online and we forgot about the customer experience. That’s part of what we’re trying to help catch up with.”