--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Backend at Vapi' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-backend-vapi-san-francisco-sx16exb9c8hy' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-05' --- # Member of Technical Staff, Backend at Vapi - **Company:** Vapi - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $200k–$325k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-05-21 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vapi/d270d613-30b8-4fdc-96e0-514993ca7a82 ## Job description Vapi (/ˈVɑːpi/): - Voice AI that resolves, not transfers - Powering 1 billion calls for companies like Amazon Ring, Intuit, ServiceTitan, and New York Life - Trusted by 1 million developers building the future of voice agents - Backed by Peak XV, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, M12, Y Combinator, and more with $72M raised - Try talking to Vapi now! https://vapi.ai/ ## WHY WE’RE HIRING THIS ROLE: - 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. ## About Vapi ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Vapi is a developer platform for building, deploying, and managing enterprise-grade voice AI agents. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $72M total funding) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2023 - **Founders**: Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Voice AI Infrastructure / Developer Tools - **Target customers**: B2B, primarily Large Enterprises (e.g., Amazon Ring, Intuit, New York Life) and a self-serve developer platform for SMBs. - **Mission or purpose**: To provide the infrastructure and orchestration layer for companies to build and deploy voice agents that deliver high-quality outcomes at scale. ## Products & Services - **[Vapi Platform]**: An API-first platform that provides the core infrastructure for building, testing, and deploying voice AI agents. It handles speech-to-text, AI orchestration, and text-to-speech, with sub-500ms latency. It supports two main primitives: - **Assistants**: Single-agent setups for specific tasks like customer support, lead qualification, and booking. - **Squads**: Multi-agent orchestration for complex workflows with context-preserving transfers (e.g., medical triage, e-commerce routing). - **[Vapi CLI]**: A command-line tool that brings the full power of the Vapi platform to a developer's terminal for rapid iteration and deployment. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: ~$500 million (post-money, as of May 2026) - **Key Metric**: Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is in the "healthy" eight figures. Total funding is $72 million. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: - **Lead Series B**: Peak XV Partners - **Other Investors**: Microsoft's M12, Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer Venture Partners - **Key Customer**: Amazon Ring, which routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi after evaluating over 40 competitors. - **Other Enterprise Customers**: Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, Intuit. - **Growth Signals**: - Handled over **1 billion** calls since launch, processing between **1 million and 5 million calls per day**. - Over **1 million developers** have used the self-serve platform. - More than **750,000 agents** have been launched on the platform. - Won Amazon Ring, a high-profile enterprise customer, in late 2024. - Active job postings are growing (+20.8% quarterly). ## Competitive Advantages - **Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure**: Offers sub-500ms latency, built-in AI guardrails, SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI compliance, single sign-on (SSO), OAuth2, and role-based access control (RBAC). - **Developer-First, Then Enterprise**: The platform was battle-tested at significant scale through its self-serve developer community before signing major enterprise clients, giving it a robustness that competitors lack. - **Granular Control**: Provides enterprises with deep control over the behavior, reliability, and compliance of their AI agents, which was a key factor in winning Amazon Ring's business. - **Scalability**: Proven to handle massive volume (billions of calls) with a 99.9% uptime SLA for enterprise clients. ## Strategic Focus - **Hiring for Scale**: The company is actively expanding its engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams to capitalize on its growth. - **Deepening Enterprise Penetration**: Following the win with Amazon Ring, Vapi is focused on onboarding more large, complex enterprises. - **Infrastructure over Application**: Vapi aims to differentiate by being the underlying orchestration and reliability layer for voice AI, rather than a pre-packaged application. ## Why Work Here - **High-Impact, Fast-Growing**: Vapi is at the center of the booming voice AI space, processing billions of calls and serving iconic companies like Amazon. Employees have a direct impact on a platform that is reshaping customer service. - **Engineering Culture**: The company is API-first and developer-centric, founded by engineers from the University of Waterloo and Y Combinator. - **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: The company appears to have a hybrid model, with roles listed in New York City (NYC) and likely San Francisco, but also offers a degree of flexibility. - **Notable Perks/Culture**: The company is still in a high-growth phase (around 100 employees), offering the opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure with a strong focus on engineering excellence and deployment support. The team includes a "Forward Deployed" engineer role, indicating a culture of deep customer partnership. ## Sources 1. [vapi.ai](https://vapi.ai/) 2. [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/vapi-hits-500m-valuation-as-amazon-ring-chose-its-ai-platform-over-40-rivals/) 3. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vapi-ai) 4. [docs.vapi.ai](https://docs.vapi.ai/) ## Other roles at Vapi - [GTM Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-recruiter-vapi-san-francisco-wahm9kdytbv0) — San Francisco, CA - [Revenue Operations Analyst](https://feeny.ai/job/revenue-operations-analyst-vapi-san-francisco-vbr90xkk1x3r) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Release Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-agentic-release-engineer-vapi-san-francisco-pgwgxkt2gmw5) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Developer Experience](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-agentic-developer-experience-vapi-san-francisco-4fkwxym79xtr) — San Francisco, CA - [Sales Development Representative (SDR)](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-sdr-vapi-san-francisco-6ewfz3dq4zbw) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Manager, Solutions Partners](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-solutions-partners-vapi-san-francisco-335sxg996ftv) — San Francisco, CA - [Recruiting Programs Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/recruiting-programs-manager-vapi-san-francisco-hx8d98m2x8vh) — San Francisco, CA - [Technical Recruiter](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-recruiter-vapi-san-francisco-8j2gx83khmk5) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Brand Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-brand-designer-vapi-san-francisco-0rdegv899n3w) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-vapi-san-francisco-fh4ed2ppwh8k) — San Francisco, CA