Ciaran Lee

Lee studied at Trinity College Dublin from 1999 to 2004, earning a BA BAI degree in Computer Engineering.⁠[1]

From April 2008 to April 2010, Lee was Lead Engineer at RateMyArea.com.⁠[1]

From April 2010 to July 2011, Lee was CTO of Exceptional in Ireland.⁠[1][2]

In 2011, Lee co-founded Intercom with Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, and David Barrett. From August 2011, he served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, running the company’s engineering infrastructure.⁠[3][4][1][2]

Lee served as Intercom’s Chief Technology Officer for 10 years until stepping down in July 2021, after which he took a break from the company, pursuing angel investing and other activities.⁠[1][3]

Episode 226 of the Code with Jason podcast, released on July 9, 2024, introduced Lee as Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Intercom. In the episode he discussed the genesis of Intercom, the scaling challenges of dealing with double-digit month-to-month growth, load balancers, canary deployment and the benefits of making many small deployments, how a robust testing environment benefits the hiring process, and in-person versus remote work.⁠[5][5][5]

On January 28, 2026, Patrick McGuirePatrick McGuirePatrick McGuire is a journalist and documentary producer and the founder and CEO of the tech video media company Soon; he previously worked in media content at Vice and Red Bull.Open the full entry publicly launched on LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry Soon, the new media company he founded in San Francisco, covering the machines, minds, and subcultures of tech’s new frontier. The post thanked investor and advisor Eoghan McCabe and named Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and Abhijeet DwivediAbhijeet DwivediAbhijeet Dwivedi is an entrepreneur and business executive who co-founded ZeroDown and Central and was responsible for operations and strategy at Zenefits. ZeroDown’s technology and team joined Flyhomes in 2024. According to public materials as of September 2026, he works at OpenAI and serves as an independent director of Fin (formerly Intercom).Open the full entry as advisors; the post did not disclose the advisors’ specific duties or compensation, nor did it give a funding amount.⁠[6][6]

Intercom is now named Fin. Since returning to the company, Lee has focused on strategic technology projects and is currently Chief Engineer and Co-founder of Fin.⁠[7][3][3]

Lee has published articles on product performance and infrastructure on the Intercom blog, including “Striving to make Intercom delightfully fast” in September 2015 and “Making our user storage more scalable and secure” in November 2019; in February 2020, he and Fergal Reid described the making of Resolution Bot.⁠[2]

Fin: Official website About page: https://fin.ai/about (opens in a new window)⁠[3]

Intercom blog author page: https://www.intercom.com/blog/author/ciaran/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ciaran_lee (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ciaran-lee-51bb402/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]