Founding Engineer

Build the AI that picks up the phone

At Real Talk you'll work on industry-leading AI voice agents that are already answering thousands of calls for some of the largest companies in Sweden and the Nordics. Our agents handle real customer service tasks over the phone in 30+ languages, with specialization in Nordic languages and dialects. Shorter wait times, happier customers, and a product that's already working in production.

We just closed a funding round and are now expanding the engineering team. Get in early at a startup that's growing fast!

Your role as a Founding Engineer

You'll work across our stack to make voice AI feel natural over the phone, which is harder than it sounds. Latency matters in milliseconds. You'll be solving real problems in a system that's actively handling customer calls every day.

Depending on your strengths, you might focus on:

• The real-time conversation engine, where transcription, language models, speech synthesis, and interruption handling all have to work together with sub-second latency
• The telephony layer, bridging the phone network into our system
• Backend and infrastructure, making sure we scale when 1000 calls hit at once
• The frontend where customers configure their agents, review calls, and get insights

The team is small enough that you'll touch most of this, and you'll own the parts you care most about.

Who You Are

• You are a tinkerer who thrives on solving difficult problems with technology
• You instinctively reach for AI to improve the way you work and the things you do day to day
• (Preferably) A few years of professional experience building production systems
• Comfortable in Python, Go and React, and willing to work across the stack
• You think about latency, reliability, and what happens when things go wrong. Real-time voice is unforgiving and we run 24/7
• Strong communicator who can work closely with customers when needed and explain technical trade-offs clearly
• Curious about how language models behave in production. You don't need to be a researcher, but you should want to dig in

Bonus points for any of: real-time audio or telephony experience, building with LLMs in production, experience building customer support or contact center products

Don't tick every box? Apply anyway. We read every application.

About The Role

• Full-time, on-site by default at our Skanstull office, overlooking the water, with a great rooftop terrace. Flexible on remote when life gets in the way
• We provide a Macbook, phone and any other tools you need to do your best work
• We pay for all the AI tools you need. We're big Claude fans at the moment!
• You'll work closely with the founders and customers to ship things that go live fast

Compensation

• Competitive base salary
• Options program: we want the people building this to own a piece of it
• 5,000 SEK wellness allowance (friskvårdsbidrag)
• 30 paid vacation days per year
• Room to grow into a senior or lead role as we scale

Why Real Talk?

• A product with concrete ROI for customers: shorter queues, lower cost per call, more time for human agents to focus on the work that actually needs them
• Growth after a recent funding round, with experienced investors backing us
• Real technical depth across telephony, real-time audio, and applied ML
• A small, ambitious team where what you build ships and gets used

Founded by builders

Real Talk's founders Tor Rauden Källstigen and Filip Hedman have spent over a decade building startups and earning the trust of customers like Telia, Tink, Microsoft, and Walmart.