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Intercom is seeking a Staff AI Designer to shape the behavior, capabilities, and integration of AI systems within their product suite. This role sits at the intersection of product design, machine learning, and user experience—going beyond traditional interface design to architect how AI agents operate, make decisions, and integrate into real-world customer workflows.
Key responsibilities include:
**Define AI Capabilities**: Identify high-value opportunities for AI across the product. Determine what AI should and should not do, establishing clear boundaries between autonomous operation and human control. Make strategic calls on scope and limitations.
**Design AI Behavior & Orchestration**: Architect AI-driven workflows and agentic systems that handle multi-step interactions, agent-to-agent communication, and real-world scenarios over time. Establish decision frameworks for when systems should act, ask for input, escalate, or defer to humans. Design for uncertainty, failures, and edge cases as core system properties. Develop design principles and heuristics that keep systems coherent and predictable as complexity scales.
**Shape Human-AI Workflows**: Design end-to-end experiences where users manage and interact with AI systems. Define where humans guide, review, or override AI decisions. Ensure users can understand, trust, and recover from system failures. Partner with product designers to continuously evolve the experience as underlying systems improve.
**Define Quality & Reliability**: Establish what "good" looks like (trust, accuracy, effort reduction, usability in context). Design evaluation scenarios and feedback loops. Analyze system outputs to identify failure modes. Design for system-level reliability that prevents agentic breakdowns.
**How You'll Work**: You'll operate in a highly autonomous, fast-moving environment, influencing direction from zero-to-one problems without formal authority. You'll bridge AI research, technical capabilities, and user needs. Collaborate deeply with ML scientists, product managers, and designers. Prototype and run focused experiments. Stay close to system behavior by regularly reviewing outputs and raising quality standards.
**What We're Looking For**: Strong product judgment and ability to influence without authority. Experience with zero-to-one products and comfort with ambiguity. Deep understanding of LLMs and their limitations, plus grounding in traditional ML. Experience defining design principles or evaluation criteria for AI systems. High standards for quality and a track record of identifying where AI breaks down in real use. Scientific mindset for designing rigorous experiments. Systems thinker who prefers designing behaviors and flows over polishing interfaces.
