Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed
Vapi · San Francisco, United States · 4mo ago
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
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