#96: “tokenmaxxing” collapse, Summer Gathering, AI Startups Residency + more
June 23 — Join the Ampli team, we're looking for contributors.
Hey 👋 Ampli community.
How were your weather management skills this weekend? Talking adaptability and fast-changing environments, did you melt in the heat, get soaked in the rain, swim in the lake, or submit to the power of the music?
Whatever it was, we hope your weekend was a good one.
Ampli’s Summer Gathering Recap
Ampli’s 2026 Summer Gathering was a total success and we didn’t want to let it pass without sharing something important and our biggest takeaways from that evening. Words that our team believe and many of the leaders that gathered that evening shared with us: however hard it might seem sometimes, we have each other. And we shouldn’t underestimate the power of the people we surround ourselves with, to bring out our best, to keep us optimistic, and to remind us what we’re capable of.
From us to you: We're so grateful that you're here. Whatever the second half of the year asks of you, we hope you meet it with people who get it, the kind of curiosity that keeps you going, and the occasional reminder that you're not doing it alone. Thanks for reading."
🚀 The AMPLI Board of Jobs “this week's Top Picks”
🎨 Lead Product Designer — JustPlay · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: Senior product or game design experience (first design-lead role welcome), proven gamification + engagement design portfolio, and a data-informed, player-centric instinct.
📊 Data Scientist — Kaufland e-commerce · Junior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: BSc/MSc in DS/Stats/ML, fluency in Python + SQL with strong production instincts, end-to-end ownership from prototype to production, and a domain interest in marketing or multi-channel attribution.
🛒 Senior Product Manager (Enterprise) — n8n · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs PM on infra / dev-tools / B2B SaaS, deep instincts for enterprise security, SSO and admin, and a track record shaping roadmaps with engineers and design partners.
💻 Senior Frontend Engineer — Helsing · Senior · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs production frontend with TypeScript + React, fluency around state, performance and real-time UI, plus willingness to clear a defence-grade security background check.
⚙️ Staff Engineer — Numa · Lead · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 8+ yrs backend with deep expertise in distributed systems at scale, proven mentorship + cross-team architecture leadership, and comfort owning the trade-offs of a fast, vertically-integrated product.
🚀 Senior DevOps Engineer — Kittl · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: 5+ yrs DevOps/SRE running production AWS/GCP at scale, deep Kubernetes / Terraform / CI-CD expertise, and comfort owning platform reliability + cost across a high-traffic AI product.
📱 Senior Mobile Engineer (Food Tracking) — Yazio · Senior · Berlin (Remote)
Min. Requirement: Senior mobile engineer with deep Android + Kotlin (Compose, ideally KMP), comfort owning features end-to-end and shipping AI-powered consumer flows; iOS/Swift welcome. Fully remote across DE / ES / PT / UK.
🤖 Software Engineer - Fullstack(m/f/d) — Reonic · Mid-Level · Berlin
Min. Requirement: 3+ yrs full-stack with TypeScript + React/Next.js + Node/Postgres, ability to own complex features end-to-end, and motivation to ship in a fast, ownership-heavy renewables-tech team.
📆 Upcoming Tech Events
Catch the latest in tech with our weekly roundup of events!
Tech Girlies Building Automation [Women+ in Automation x Ampli] | Monday, June 22
Funding Your Way: A Founder’s Guide to Raising Capital | Monday, June 22
Rooftop World Cup Viewing: Argentina vs. Austria & France vs. Iraq | Monday, June 22
AI in Production Meetup @ GetYourGuide | Tuesday, June 23
High-Risk HR: Preparing Your People Team for the EU AI Act | Tuesday, June 23
Mentor-mentee meetup #18 - Engineering job seekers in Berlin | Wednesday, June 24
Founders & Friends Berlin Meetup - Summer Party | Wednesday, June 24
Women Who Scale: Navigating Career, Culture & Ambition in Tech | Thursday, June 25
Daytona HackSprint w/ AI Builders - Berlin, June 2026 | Friday, June 26
n8n Berlin Community Meetup - Rooftop Edition | Friday, June 26
YC Berlin Meetup • Summer Edition | Friday, June 26
Build your first app with AI before lunch | Saturday, June 27
Run & Cowork | Sunday, June 28
AI in Sales 2026: Scale Revenue Without Scaling Headcount | Thursday, July 2
GTM Rooftop Drinks 🪄 | Thursday, July 2
Turkish Product People in Berlin: After Work Networking | Friday, July 3
✨BONUS: Summer is when we all get extra picky with how we spend our time, and it’s hard to decide if we’re locked in or letting go. Our team is still in the locked-in mindset, so we’d pay special attention to “High-Risk HR: Preparing Your People Team for the EU AI Act” on June 23. But ask us again mid-July, and we’d probably be choosing rooftop drinks instead.
OjinAixHaus: Startups Callout
Residences at Ojin AixHaus are opening for AI startups: a home in Berlin Mitte for teams who want a base to build from. The space is filled with builders at different stages and working on different problems and stacks, and that variety is the point. The person next to you may have already encountered the issue you are about to face, developed the necessary tool, or know exactly who you should talk to.
Building something in AI and want a base in Berlin? Reach out at the link below.
📍 Ojin AixHaus, Chausseestraße, Berlin Mitte
🎟 https://ojin.ai/community
🖥 High-signal content and news
The “tokenmaxxing” era just collapsed — Uber, Microsoft, and Amazon are all pulling back — Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Microsoft cancelled Claude Code licenses for entire product divisions due to cost. One unnamed enterprise reportedly spent $500M on Claude in a single month after forgetting to set usage limits. The culture that defined 2025 is officially over, and what replaces it is an ROI-first era where every AI line item needs to justify itself.
ERT: 6–8 min · 📰 News
A new market is forming around managing AI’s runaway costs — As companies scramble to understand where their AI spend is actually going, a wave of startups, vendors, and a new standards body (the Tokenomics Foundation) are racing to build the tooling and shared language this market currently lacks. There’s no canonical definition yet for what a “token” costs, what it produces, or how to compare spend across providers, which means whoever builds the FinOps-for-AI category first has a real moat.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🚀 Founders
Berlin’s Seqana raises €3.2M to turn soil health into a measurable, financial risk metric — Seqana uses satellite imagery and machine learning to quantify soil carbon and health at scale, working with Danone, Bayer, and carbon project developers across millions of hectares. The new round extends the company beyond carbon credits into a broader supply-chain risk product.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin
Figma’s design agent can now search the web — closing the placeholder-content gap. As of June 18, Figma’s AI agent can pull live web context directly into a design file, real product names, real copy, and real reference images, instead of forcing designers to swap out Lorem Ipsum and stock photos later.
ERT: 3–5 min · 🎨 Design & PMs
Entry-level tech hiring contracted hard in 2026 — but it didn’t disappear, it moved. 148,092 tech workers have been displaced this year at a pace of 981/day, and software developer employment for ages 22–25 is down nearly 20% since 2024. But ML engineer postings are up 59% above pre-pandemic levels, cybersecurity postings are up 124%, and IBM just tripled its US entry-level hiring after rewriting junior job descriptions around AI-augmented work instead of boilerplate coding.
ERT: 6–8 min · 🌱 Entry Level Relevant
Berlin’s INXM emerges from stealth with €5.7M to fix why enterprise AI projects fail. INXM’s founding team, former chief digital officers of Isar Aerospace and Volocopter, alongside n8n and Thoughtworks veterans, built an “AI Process Execution Engine” that generates deterministic, auditable workflow code instead of years of brittle implementation.
ERT: 4–6 min · 🇩🇪 Berlin · 🧑💻 Engineering and Data