telli was founded in 2024. We were part of the YC Fall ‘24 batch. In the last couple of months, we’ve grown to 6-figure ARR and raised a $3.6M seed from investors including Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator, and great strategic angels

about us

At telli we are building AI voice agents that are reshaping an entire industry.

Since launching 8-months ago, we raised a $3.6M pre-seed round from Cherry and Y Combinator and grew to >$1M in ARR. We are looking for a team members who want to go all-in to help us achieve the next milestone: $10M in ARR.

Two of our co-founders Finn and Philipp previously scaled the heat pump unit of energy unicorn Enpal from 0-150 people. They've seen the ins and outs of scaling phone-based customer processes. These businesses are rushing to deploy AI voice agents. However, creating a demo is easy — building reliable agents that handle millions of calls in production is incredibly hard.

In a world where intelligence becomes a commodity, it is up to us builders to craft new product experiences that let people harness the power of AI.

But building AI voice agents comes with challenges:

• What is the most intuitive way for humans to build and adjust their own AI agents?

• How do you build agents that work reliably across millions of calls in a world of non-determinism?

• How do you ensure that customers can use the latest foundational models without having to understand the technical trade-offs?

• How do you enable companies to build hybrid teams of human and AI agents?

• What does human-computer interaction look like if, instead of having UI elements, you have a hyper-intelligent sidekick?

These are unsolved problems. Problems that haven't existed since the invention of computers. Solutions that worked in a pre-LLM world won't work today. Nobody knows how to solve these problems; it's up to us to figure it out.

We’re a small, fully in-person team based in Berlin. Even though most people have told us to build this company in SF because of “better talent” - we know there is amazing talent in Europe. We believe you can build a multi-billion dollar software company in Europe, and there is no better time to do this than now.

about the role

This is the perfect role for someone with an engineering background (e.g. recent CS grad, engineering bootcamp, business informatics) who wants to use their technical skills in an applied customer-facing/commercial role.

AI is changing how customers buy software. Many companies want to use AI but don't know how to best integrate these new technologies into their business workflows. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the face of telli in front of our customers. You will shape how our customers get onboarded, integrate telli into their systems, and help develop business workflows to ensure the highest quality and performance of our agents.

If you’re technical, have strong communication skills, and can organize unstructured information well, you’ll be great for this role.

what you’ll be responsible for

• owning communication with customers

• helping customers build and develop telli agents that handle thousands of calls a day

• shape and automate customer onboarding processes

• support customers with prompt engineering

• translate customer learnings to inform what we build next

• debug technical issues

what makes you a great fit

• you have a software engineering background (CS degree, worked as a software engineer, did a bootcamp, or built software projects)

• you’re an excellent communicator in both English and German (additional languages are a big plus)

• you’ve built AI agents and understand topics like prompt engineering and evals

• you’re great at translating what customers say into what they actually mean

• you’re on top of the newest AI trends and have tinkered a lot with AI

• you are open to occasionally travel within Europe to customers

• you’re still early in your career and hungry to learn

• you want to help build a multi-billion dollar company from the ground up

you may _ not _ make a good fit if…

• you can only write code with the help of AI

• you have a pure business background but want to transition to tech

• you only like ‘strategic’ work and don’t want to get your hands dirty

• you don’t understand how web applications & APIs work under the hood

• you want to work 9–5

perks

• above-market pay & equity

• access to any (AI) tool that makes you more productive

• gym subscription

• company trip to San Francisco in fall 2025

our tech stack includes TypeScript, React, TanStack, Node, Python, Postgres as well as Temporal.io and Pipecat. But more than familiarity with any specific technology, we value a customer-centric approach and ability to ship end-to-end features.