HR Business Partner at Intercom: supporting an engineering org scaling 2x

A recruiter from a specialist HR firm reached out to me directly. I hadn't applied anywhere near Intercom on my own. I was passively open to moves but hadn't started a formal search, so the timing caught me off guard. I'd submitted around six applications in total over the previous few weeks, mostly exploratory, but this one came inbound and felt more serious than the rest right away. The brief was specific: Intercom was scaling its engineering organisation from 200 to 400 people within 18 months and needed an HR Business Partner who could own that function end to end, not just support it from the sidelines. The process ran across four interview rounds over 33 days, which felt considered rather than drawn out. First was a screen with the recruiter, mostly about my background partnering with technical organisations and my appetite for high-growth environments. Then I spoke with the CPO, who wanted to understand how I thought about people strategy at scale: levelling frameworks, internal mobility, manager capability building. The third round was with the Engineering VP, the hiring manager, and it got more operational. How I'd structure my first 90 days, how I'd approach a reorg, how I'd handle a situation where engineering ↓