--- title: 'People Operations Manager at fonio' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/people-operations-manager-fonio-vienna-14197ne9dje8' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # People Operations Manager at fonio - **Company:** fonio - **Location:** Vienna, Austria - **Compensation:** €65k–€80k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-06-16 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/fonio/174fb5e8-2591-4423-b83f-011f36421049 ## Job description We build AI voice agents for small and medium-sized businesses so they never miss a call and can focus on the work they actually love. Our AI handles every call automatically. But voice is just the beginning. Our vision: to build the world's first fully automated CRM. 8,000+ customers. >€5M ARR. ~30% monthly growth. Target until EOY: €30M. We live ownership: you own your work end-to-end. No politics, few meetings, direct feedback. ## Your Role You own everything after a candidate signs, from contracts through offboarding, and automate as much of it as possible. We are looking for someone to build the structural backbone to enable rapid scaling. - Contracts & onboarding: Manage employment contracts for all employees (direct and indirect employment), organize equipment, accounts, workspaces, and support relocation of international colleagues. - HR tooling & automation: introduce and own an HRIS tool, automate workflows across systems. - Payroll: Organize and own internal payroll processes, including variable compensation calculation of all sales teams. - Compliance & people legal: Support international hiring (EU and non-EU), time-tracking, collective agreements, international taxation topics, etc. - Compensation: Manage and monitor compensation bands across teams/countries. - Events & culture: Organize internal and external events (hackathons, off-sites, etc.) - Offboarding: Manage offboarding of employees. - Later, people development: Design feedback cycles, L&D, career development (e.g. SDR academy). What to Expect - Solo, end-to-end ownership of everything people operations. - Hands-on operational work to build the foundation for automation/scaling. - Direct impact: your work has immediate influence on the culture of fonio. - Flat hierarchies: close collaboration across departments. ## What You Bring - 3+ year of People Ops, HR, or Operations experience, ideally startup or scale-up. - Knowledge about Austrian labor law, payroll, and collective agreements - Structured, hands-on working style. - AI and automation/workflow skills. - People-first, low ego. You thrive under intensity. - German native, strong English. ## What We Offer - €65,000 to €80,000 - Equity - Relocation support - Daily lunch and dinner - Equipment of your choice - Regular team off-sites - On-site in Vienna, working directly with the core-team Hiring Process - 15 min intro call - 30 min skill interview - 20 min culture fit with the founders ## About fonio ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: fonio is a European AI platform that provides AI phone assistants and omnichannel customer communication solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) - **Headquarters**: Vienna, Austria - **Founded**: 2024 - **Founders**: Daniel Keinrath (CEO) and Matthias Gruber (CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI-powered customer communication / Telecommunications - **Target customers**: B2B, primarily small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with high volumes of customer calls - **Mission or purpose statement**: To ensure no lead, customer, or opportunity is missed by providing 24/7 AI-powered communication across phone, WhatsApp, email, and chat. ## Products & Services - **AI Phone Assistant**: An AI agent that handles inbound and outbound calls, capable of scheduling appointments, answering inquiries, processing orders, and transcribing conversations. It features speech recognition for difficult dialects, turn-detection for natural conversation flow, and real-time emotion recognition. It can be set up in under 10 minutes with no coding required. - **Omnichannel Platform**: Expanding beyond voice to include WhatsApp (already live), with email and chatbot support to follow. The platform integrates with CRMs, calendar tools, and databases via native integrations and APIs. - **Proprietary Calendar**: An AI-native calendar tool that is already live as part of the platform. - **Proprietary CRM**: A CRM purpose-built for AI-driven customer interactions, expected to launch by the end of Q3 2026. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: $140 million valuation (as of June 2026, per seed round) - **Key Metric**: Total funding of over $20 million, including a $17 million seed round led by 20VC (June 2026) and a €3 million angel round (December 2025). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: 20VC (lead), with participation from founders and executives of Synthesia, HubSpot, and Revolut. Previous angel investors include early backers of Facebook and Airbnb. - **Growth Signals**: - Over 7,000 customers across nine markets (Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Poland, Brazil, UK, USA) - Automates over 2 million calls per month - Growing at roughly 40% month-over-month - Acquired competitor fluently in September 2025 - Added $1 million in ARR in April 2026 alone, targeting a 5x increase by year-end - Opening offices in New York, Munich, Milan, Paris, London, Warsaw, and Barcelona ## Competitive Advantages - **Proprietary European Infrastructure**: Develops its own orchestration layer and models (speech recognition, turn-detection, emotion recognition), ensuring all data remains in the EU on servers in Nuremberg, Germany. This differentiates them from competitors who white-label US services. - **High End-to-End Resolution Rate**: In roughly 90% of cases, the AI agent conducts a fully human-like conversation and resolves the inquiry without needing to route it to a human. - **Builder-Heavy Team**: Over half the team are former founders, operations leaders, or people who have scaled products at companies like Canva. ## Strategic Focus - **Omnichannel Expansion**: Moving beyond voice to become a full omnichannel platform (WhatsApp, email, chat). - **International Expansion**: Establishing physical offices in key markets (New York, Munich, Milan, Paris, London, Warsaw, Barcelona) after recent launches in the UK and US. - **Building an AI-Native Tool Ecosystem**: Developing a proprietary calendar and CRM to create a complete, integrated platform for customer communication. ## Why Work Here - **Rapid Growth & Impact**: The company is in a phase of hypergrowth (40% MoM), and employees are "still early enough that your work will genuinely shape the culture, the product, and the company." [fonio.ai/en/careers](https://www.fonio.ai/en/careers) - **Culture**: Described as fast, committed, and in-office by default. The team emphasizes moving fast and having fun. Most roles are Vienna-based, with the expectation of being in the office most days. - **Remote Options**: Engineering roles are fully remote (within ±3 hours of CET). For other roles, there is a temporary relocation to Vienna for onboarding (1-3 months), followed by relocation to the target market. - **Relocation Support**: The company sponsors travel and accommodation in Vienna for the onboarding period and offers full relocation support for moving to target markets. - **Team Size**: Around 40-50 people, with plans to double by the end of the year. - **Hiring Process**: A 3-4 step process: 15-minute intro call, 30-45 minute skills interview (sometimes with a case study), potentially a deeper skills or leadership interview, and a final 20-minute culture call with both founders. [fonio.ai/en/careers](https://www.fonio.ai/en/careers) ## Sources 1. [fonio.ai - Product Page](https://www.fonio.ai/en) 2. [fonio.ai - Careers Page](https://www.fonio.ai/en/careers) 3. [fonio.ai - Press Section](https://www.fonio.ai/en/press) 4. [fonio.ai - Seed Funding Press Release](https://www.fonio.ai/en/news-cool-stuff/pr-14mio-seed-funding-20vc) 5. [LinkedIn - fonio.ai](https://at.linkedin.com/company/fonio-ai) ## Other roles at fonio - [Social Media & Community Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-community-manager-fonio-vienna-vd3p93hhvnwj) — Vienna, Austria - [Growth Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-engineer-fonio-remote-8xeajdkg6n6r) - [Marketing Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/marketing-engineer-fonio-vienna-eqy8jk8et4f8) — Vienna, Austria - [Performance Marketer](https://feeny.ai/job/performance-marketer-fonio-vienna-d1ney0xvz97a) — Vienna, Austria - [Mid-Market Account Executive (Brazil)](https://feeny.ai/job/mid-market-account-executive-brazil-fonio-campinas-gd50q16287dh) — Campinas, Brazil - [Social Media Creator (Brazil)](https://feeny.ai/job/social-media-creator-brazil-fonio-campinas-2j6xk1wvkeqj) — Campinas, Brazil - [Sales Development Representative (US)](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-us-fonio-new-york-30bef24m6djx) — New York, NY - [Forward Deployed Engineer (Polish)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-polish-fonio-warsaw-wrrkmre8zjen) — Warsaw, Poland - [Partner Manager (Polish)](https://feeny.ai/job/partner-manager-polish-fonio-warsaw-ywysek0a4qjw) — Warsaw, Poland - [Revenue Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-operations-lead-fonio-vienna-z70ss5yb4mg6) — Vienna, Austria