Olli Lehikoinen
Founding Engineer building voice LLM agents with customers, from the first sales call, through the pilot, to a working product. 8+ years of experience in software development, engineering management, and startups. Based in Espoo, Finland.
About
I've spent over 8 years building software and automating messy processes, both digital and on a factory floor. I enjoy finding simpler ways of doing things and cutting down the fluff.
Currently building voice LLM agents. Previously managed the factory software team at Swappie, founded an AI startup through Antler, and built fintech products at Taaleri.
Experience
Save as PDFFounding Engineer
Sep 2025 - PresentSono
Voice LLM agents for customer support calls.
- Designed and built the company's first product that works for new customers without custom builds
- Technical lead on customer sales calls. Ran pilots from start to end and handled customer communication during them
- Raised license plate capture from about 60% to 93% by building an eval set from real calls, switching STT provider based on it, and adding spelling-alphabet readback and retries
- Built context management for a node-based voice agent to cut latency and keep the call feeling like one conversation. Scrapped it and the parallel LLM/TTS tests once newer models could hold the full context
- Set up the team's agentic coding workflow with shared skills, project rules, hooks and an AI review step that checks changes against the rules
Independent Technical Advisor
Jan 2025 - Aug 2025Miekka Solutions
Own consulting company, started during parental leave. Delivered client projects in AI, DevOps, and refurbishment operations.
Founder & CTO
May 2024 - Dec 2024Adeu
Built an AI timekeeping system for lawyers.
- Built LLM-powered MVP for automated time tracking in 3 months
- Did technical sales and problem validation interviews
- Narrowed the idea from process management software to time tracking, a shared pain for law firms
Founder in Residence
Nov 2023 - May 2024Antler
Validated SaaS and AI business ideas with market research and user interviews. Formed a three-person founding team and secured pre-seed funding.
Software Engineering Manager
Oct 2021 - Nov 2023Swappie
Manager and technical lead of the factory software team, focused on refurbishment efficiency and profitability tracking.
- Led the team's system design and pushed for the simplest solution that works
- Owned the factory systems that ran production, where software downtime stopped the line
- Built validation and routing so each phone moved to the right step in the factory
- Led factory automation projects including robotics integrations
- Changed warehousing so the most profitable phones got repaired first
- Coached engineers to make their own decisions. The team ended up mostly self-managed with little process and a rotating facilitator
- Managed up to 8 engineers. Nobody quit after the layoffs
Senior Software Developer
Aug 2020 - Sep 2021Swappie
Factory software team. Promoted to manager after leading the ERP project.
- Led the NetSuite ERP integration to improve cost reporting and phone event validation. Designed how each phone lives in the ERP, and changed phone events and lifecycle in our system to keep the two in sync
- Sent per-phone refurbishment costs to NetSuite, cutting finance's manual cost calculation
- Integrated Blancco diagnostics and erasure into operations
Software Developer
Jan 2018 - Aug 2020Taaleri
Part of the internal startup team that created the Taaleri mobile app and Impakti investment product.
- Built backend for the React Native mobile application
- Integrated CRM and portfolio management systems
- Managed cloud release pipelines and infrastructure
Education
Master's degree, Software and Service Engineering
Aalto University, 2017 - 2019
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science
Aalto University, 2015 - 2017
What Others Say
"While Olli is an accomplished software engineer and was definite authority in our systems' design, I feel his greatest contribution to our team was grounding its work to the simplest, most impactful objectives. Olli would often challenge the team to consider how to quickest provide impact to the stakeholders without compromising on systems' quality attributes."— Aleksi Mäkinen, Senior Software Engineer at Swappie
"Olli is a talented software developer with a good understanding of agile development practices. He writes well-tested code and creates robust integrations. He has also plenty of business insights related to accounting and logistics."— Onni Hakala, Software Engineering Leader at Swappie
"After stepping into his first leadership and line manager role Olli started to read leadership books and work with his new reports in an effective way. By the end of his tenure he had transformed from directly managing the team to deliver to having the team be mostly autonomously managed through efficient processes and facilitation rotation."— Jori Ahvonen, CTO at Swappie
Beyond the Screen
When not building software, you'll find me on alpine passes or somewhere warm and remote.
Contact
Get in touch: olli@otl.fi