--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Core Backend at Vapi' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-core-backend-vapi-san-francisco-8dhcggx10xb3' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # Member of Technical Staff, Core Backend at Vapi - **Company:** Vapi - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $180k–$265k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-06-11 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vapi/941f5562-52f1-43f0-92d4-9d05931c0955 ## 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: The StreamModule pipeline — VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport — runs on cork/uncork backpressure during live phone calls. A hundred milliseconds of delay is audible. This role owns pipeline stability and pluggability, so the agents and FDE teams can add new models and providers without touching core. You’ll consolidate BullMQ into Kafka, harden the provider abstractions (LLM, STT, TTS base classes), instrument the pipeline with event-driven OTEL tracing, and shore up the Postgres SPOFs that contributed to the Oct 15 and Oct 22 incidents. What You’ll Do: 30 Day: Ramp on the StreamModule pipeline and the cork/uncork backpressure model. Walk the Oct 15 / Oct 22 DB incidents and the duplicate-message incident. Land a scoped pipeline or provider-abstraction improvement. 60 Day: Own a slice of the BullMQ → Kafka consolidation. Ship event-driven OTEL instrumentation for at least one critical pipeline stage. Harden one provider plugin path so a new model can be added without core changes. 90 Day: Drive a measurable reliability or latency win on the call path. Be the backend owner that agents and FDE teams pull in for design reviews on new providers and pipeline changes. Who You Are: Must-haves: - You’ve built real-time or streaming systems in production — media pipelines, streaming data, or event-driven backends. You’ve debugged a backpressure cascade. - You have opinions on queue architecture (BullMQ, Kafka, Temporal) and when each is the right fit. - You’ve built plugin or adapter architectures — extending base classes cleanly, with decoupled implementations. - You’ve operated Postgres at scale: connection pooling, read replicas, schema migrations (Liquibase or similar). - You instrument with OpenTelemetry and think in event-driven traces, not just logs. Nice-to-haves: - TypeScript + Node.js + NestJS. The codebase is huge NestJS, but a strong systems-thinking engineer ramps fast — language doesn’t gate the hire. Tech stack you’ll work in: - Languages: TypeScript on Node.js (primary). - Framework: NestJS (large codebase). - Pipeline: StreamModule (VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport), cork/uncork backpressure. - Queues: BullMQ (current), Kafka (target — consolidation on roadmap), Temporal. - Database: Postgres (connection pooling, read replicas), Liquibase for schema migrations. - Plugin system: provider abstractions — LLM, STT, TTS base classes (pluggable, decoupled from model integrations). - Observability: OpenTelemetry tracing, event-driven instrumentation. Where you likely come from: A streaming or real-time platform (Discord, Slack, Zoom, Twitch, Mux, LiveKit), an ML-infra company (Modal, Baseten, Replicate, Together), or a pipeline/workflow shop (Temporal, Stripe Radar, trading systems). Weak fit: backend engineer who’s only built systems where users don’t wait in real time (overnight jobs, reports, dashboards). Why Vapi: Generational impact: Build the human interface for every business Ownership culture: 70% of the company are previous founders Kind team: The founders, Jordan and Nikhil, are Canadians Tier-1 Investors: YC, KP seed, Bessemer Series A, Recent Series B raise 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, 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 - [Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-infrastructure-engineer-vapi-san-francisco-r6mn1my5z43y) — San Francisco, CA - [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