Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

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!

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