--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed at Vapi' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-forward-deployed-vapi-san-francisco-234fragp3qb3' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-12' --- # Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed at Vapi - **Company:** Vapi - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $200k–$280k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-05-21 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/vapi/854a9bf5-e330-4afa-9c0f-38c3d6084808 ## 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 Our Enterprise ARR has grown 10x — customers like Amazon Ring, NY Life and Intuit deploy in weeks and expand rapidly when we support them well. Customer deployments now consume most of our current FDE capacity, which means platform roadmap work competes directly with delivery. We're opening more seats this quarter in San Francisco and New York to take on that unowned roadmap work. Steady-state accounts are handing off to our Agent Engineering team so FDEs can return to building the platform, not just running it. Unlike a solutions engineer, an FDE ships code: into customer repos, into Vapi's GitOps configs, and into the Vapi platform itself. This isn't CRUD engineering. You're building real-time, latency-sensitive systems that orchestrate multiple providers — speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech, telephony — simultaneously, in production, at enterprise scale. It's the kind of systems problem most engineers only get to touch on infra teams at much larger companies, and you'll own it end to end. ## What You'll Do - 30 Day: Deploy an Enterprise customer end-to-end - 60 Day: Ship internal tooling or product contributions that make the next similar deployment materially faster - 90 Day: Establish a process or infrastructure the team didn't know it needed ## What You'll Own - Lead deployment engagements end to end for assigned enterprise customers, from scoping through go-live and handoff - Build production-ready Vapi deployments (assistants, squads, tools, structured outputs, telephony/SIP, webhooks, integrations) - Debug live production issues across call records, app logs, provider request/response, and infra metrics - Own customer-facing GitOps repos and dedicated cluster configuration - Manage technical and executive stakeholders across technical and non-technical audiences - Build platform work that removes deployment toil: outbound campaigns, evals and simulations, observability, CLI and MCP tooling - Feed deployment insight back into the product roadmap ## Who You Are - You've worked in a technical role at an early-stage startup — you know what it means to build without a playbook - You've been an FDE, Solutions Architect, or Solutions Engineer at a company we admire - You've driven process change proactively — not because someone asked, but because you couldn't leave a broken system alone - You're comfortable operating in ambiguity and find structure by doing, not by waiting - You have a genuine bias toward action: you identify a gap, you fix it, you document it - Bonus: You've built your own startup or pursued your own projects, and iterated on them ## What We're Looking For - 5+ years of professional engineering experience - Strong generalist: you can move between UI/UX implementation, API design, data modeling, and systems architecture - Early-stage startup experience — you've worn multiple hats in a scrappy, resource-constrained environment - Can communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders - Conceptual understanding of working with AI in production Hard Skills - Backend: Node.js, Express, FastAPI, Django, or Flask - Frontend: React, Next.js, Vue, or Tailwind - Language: TypeScript or Python - Database: SQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, or Redis - Deployment: AWS, GCP, Azure, Vercel, or Railway - Coding Tools: Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or Windsurf ## Nice to Have - AI/ML: LLM APIs, RAG, vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector), self-hosted models - Infra: Docker, Kubernetes, IaC - Real-time: WebSockets, SSE, WebRTC, SIP - Led a project without a management title - Open source contributions - Has shipped at least one product with real users — at least one of the following should be easy to verify: - Product with 1,000+ active users - Product generating revenue from paying customers - Product a real company depended on to run part of their operations - 1+ year as a founding or early engineer (first 10) at a startup that raised Series A or beyond ## 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, Kleiner Perkins seed, Bessemer Series A ## What We Offer - Real stake: Competitive salary and excellent equity ownership - Comprehensive health coverage: Medical, dental, and vision - Team love: We hang out — quarterly off-sites included - 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