Member of Technical Staff, Backend at Vapi (San Francisco, CA)Member of Technical Staff, Backend

• More than 1 million developers have built 2.7M+ agents on Vapi. Every assistant depends on a growing product surface—from Composer, Simulations, Monitoring, and Knowledge Base to Versioning and Deployments.
• Behind those experiences are hard backend product problems: durable APIs and data models, real-time and asynchronous workflows, observability, evaluations, guardrails, and reliable operation of non-deterministic systems.
• We’re hiring a backend product engineer to own those systems end to end and help customers move voice agents from a compelling demo to dependable production—at Fortune 500 scale. The work is genuinely hard and unusually fun.

What You’ll Do:

• 30 Days: Make real calls and build real assistants across LLM, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and telephony integrations. Develop a working mental model of how Vapi’s product surfaces map to APIs, services, data systems, and production workflows, then ship your first scoped backend product improvement.
• 60 Days: Own a meaningful backend area in agent self-improvement, trust, or guardrails. Take a customer problem from product spec to shipped system—designing the API, services, and data model; defining evaluation and rollout criteria; and instrumenting the result. Use AI coding agents thoughtfully as a throughput and quality lever.
• 90 Days: Operate as an independent owner for a customer-facing backend area. Run the full improvement loop—authoring, evaluation, deployment, observation, and iteration—while improving reliability and developer experience. Be a core voice in product decisions and have multiple meaningful improvements in production.

Who You Are:

Must-haves

• A track record operating at senior or staff scope: independently owning customer-facing backend product areas from an ambiguous problem through measurable production outcomes.
• Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or a comparable backend stack, plus the ability to design clear APIs, services, and data models.
• Experience building distributed or asynchronous systems with databases, queues, workflows, or event-driven patterns—and reasoning clearly about failure modes.
• Strong product judgment: you start with the user problem, turn incomplete requirements into a clear technical approach, and make tradeoffs based on customer impact.
• Production ownership: you care about testing, observability, reliability, incident response, safe rollouts, and what happens after launch.
• Regular, thoughtful use of AI-assisted development tools to improve speed and quality, paired with strong engineering judgment about the result.
• Self-direction, customer empathy, and clear communication. You stay hands-on, collaborate directly across functions, and remain accountable for outcomes.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with Postgres and high-volume, event-driven systems using queues or durable workflows such as BullMQ, Kafka, or Temporal.
• Experience with real-time systems, voice or telephony, LLM-powered products, or AI agents.
• Experience operating cloud-native services on AWS and Kubernetes/EKS.
• Experience building developer platforms, public APIs, SDKs, or dashboards used by technical customers.
• Experience at a fast-growing startup, building a zero-to-one product, or founding a company.
• Open-source contributions, public technical writing, or other evidence of craft beyond your day job.

How We Work:

• Build something worthy of love
• Craft matters. We aim to build products and experiences customers genuinely love, not just tolerate.
• Commit and follow through
• We finish what we start and build trust by being people others can count on.
• Why not today?
• We value urgency and momentum. The fastest path to customer value usually wins.
• Seek raw input
• We go directly to customers, data, and teammates instead of relying on summaries or assumptions.
• It’s our problem
• We operate as one team. We share credit, own mistakes together, and support each other when things get hard.
• Be direct and kind
• We give feedback clearly, respectfully, and without delay.

Why Vapi:

• Generational impact: Build the human interface for every business
• Ownership culture: Many of us are previous founders
• Kind team: The founders, Jordan and Nikhil, are Canadians
• Tier-1 investors: Peak XV (Series B), Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, M12, and Y Combinator

What We Offer:

• Real stake: We offer a competitive salary and excellent equity ownership
• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision plans
• Team love: We love hanging out, and we do quarterly off-sites
• Flexible time off: take what you need
• More: catered meals, transportation, gym, equipment, and a $10k annual L&D budgetMore: catered meals, transportation, gym, and a $10k annual L&D budget.