Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

At telli, we're building the first AI-native phone system.

Since launching last year at Y Combinator, we've grown >$2M in annualized revenue with a team of only 12 people.

Today, most B2C companies fail in their customer communication not because they don't care, but because they can't keep up. The sheer volume of calls forces them to outsource to poor-quality external call centers or have their internal teams spend hours on repetitive calls.

With telli, our customers now rely on AI voice agents that handle their repetitive calls, freeing human agents to focus on what matters - talking to customers when it counts. The result: higher efficiency, happier teams, and better customer experiences.

We've seen firsthand that legacy phone systems are not designed for an AI-first world. That is why we are building the first AI-native phone system that lets B2C companies manage both their human and AI teams on one platform.

Our founding team knows this problem inside-out, having managed a 150-person call center before. We know how painful and expensive scaling phone operations can be for companies.

There is a lot of work ahead. The opportunity is massive. We are ending an era of poor-quality external call centers.

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.

• 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

• 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 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

• above-market pay & equity

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

• gym subscription

• company trip to San Francisco in fall 2025