Full-Time

Member of Technical Staff

Infrastructure

Updated on 5/12/2026

Vapi

Vapi

51-200 employees

Platform for building voice AI agents

Compensation Overview

$200k - $280k/yr

San Francisco, CA, USA

In Person

Category
Software Engineering (1)
Required Skills
Kubernetes
Apache Kafka
Postgres
Clickhouse
AWS
Go
Redis
Requirements
  • You've run multi-cluster Kubernetes on EKS in production — backend, networking, persistence, monitoring, models, and kafka clusters per region — and you've used Cluster API or similar for programmatic cluster creation.
  • You've operated a stateful data plane (PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Temporal, etcd, ClickHouse) at scale — you've sharded it, migrated data between instances, and lived with the consequences.
  • You're fluent in Envoy and Cilium/eBPF. You're comfortable debugging Envoy response flags, conntrack drops, and cross-zone LB behavior. VPC/NAT/Cloudflare alone isn't enough.
  • You've run multi-region Kafka on MSK in production — not just Kafka. You've dealt with regional topic naming, MSK Pulumi drift, and compliance constraints.
  • You write Go for control-plane services. Vapi's cluster-manager, traffic-control-plane, and environment-manager are all Go, and you're comfortable owning code in that stack.
Responsibilities
  • Ramp on the cell-based architecture, the regional EKS clusters (backend / networking / persistence / monitoring / models / kafka), and the Pulumi stacks. Shadow oncall, walk recent incidents (Envoy response flags, conntrack drops, cross-zone LB target resets), and own a first scoped infra change end-to-end.
  • Take ownership of one core domain — e.g., multi-region MSK (regional topic naming, Pulumi drift, compliance constraints), the Postgres/Neon consolidation path, or programmatic cluster creation via Cluster API. Ship a control-plane improvement in Go and drive a measurable reliability or capacity win.
  • Lead a roadmap pillar of the cell-based build-out: a new region, a stateful workload migration, or unblocking the SIP gateway SPOF. Operate as the infra owner other teams pull in for design reviews, and set the standards (runbooks, failure-domain modeling, capacity targets) the next infra hires inherit.
Desired Qualifications
  • SIP / RTP / telephony background.
  • Cell-based / shard architecture experience — Shopify pods, AWS cell-based reference arch, Slack shards, or equivalent.
  • Experience coming from a company that ran cell-based in production or a distributed systems shop (Cockroach, MongoDB, Confluent, Temporal, Redpanda, ClickHouse Inc.) or a voice/video/CPaaS company (Twilio, Plivo, Bandwidth, Vonage, LiveKit, Daily.co, Dialpad) or an Envoy/service-mesh organization (Lyft, Stripe, Airbnb, Pinterest, Isovalent/Cilium) or a streaming-infra team (Confluent, Uber, LinkedIn, Datadog) that ran MSK/Kafka multi-region.

Vapi provides an infrastructure platform to build and deploy enterprise-grade voice AI agents. Developers use flexible APIs and an SDK to create, test, and deploy voice agents for inbound and outbound calls, using a mix of STT, LLMs, and TTS from integrated or third-party providers to deliver low-latency conversations. Clients can bring their own API keys or use Vapi's models, giving control over cost and performance across industries like healthcare, finance, and travel, from startups to Fortune 500s. The goal is to simplify building scalable voice operations and enable rapid deployment of AI-powered call workflows, with a usage-based pricing model per minute plus telephony and AI costs, differentiating itself through a developer-centric approach and provider-agnostic orchestration.

Company Size

51-200

Company Stage

Series A

Total Funding

$20.1M

Headquarters

San Francisco, California

Founded

2021

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • Enterprise adoption across healthcare, finance, travel with Fortune 500 customers.
  • $20M Series A at $130M valuation enables rapid infrastructure scaling.
  • Global language coverage and real-time audio streaming expand addressable market.

What critics are saying

  • OpenAI Direct Voice API commoditizes voice infrastructure, reducing Vapi's orchestration value.
  • Retell AI's sub-400ms latency and end-to-end model ownership erodes developer preference.
  • EU AI Act fines up to 7% revenue for high-risk healthcare deployments lacking deterministic outputs.

What makes Vapi unique

  • Sub-500ms response times with flexible STT/LLM/TTS provider selection.
  • HIPAA and SOC-2 compliance with LLM guardrails for regulated sectors.
  • Production-grade features: tool calling, A/B testing, voicemail detection, AI testing.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

Company Equity

401(k) Company Match

Company News

Latest Nigerian News
Dec 13th, 2024
Vapi, which helps businesses deploy AI-powered voice agents, raised a $20M Series A from Bessemer, Y Combinator, and others, a source says at a $130M valuation (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)

Vapi, which helps businesses deploy AI-powered voice agents, raised a $20M Series A from Bessemer, Y Combinator, and others, a source says at a $130M valuation (Kritika lamba/reuters).

FinSMEs
Dec 12th, 2024
Vapi Raises $20M in Series A Funding

Vapi raises $20M in Series A funding.

Tech Funding News
Dec 12th, 2024
Vapi raises $20M to deploy AI voice agents to transform customer interactions — TFN

Vapi, a developer platform for deploying Voice AI agents, has raised $20 million in Series A funding.

Startup 365
Dec 12th, 2024
Vapi Dials-in $20M in Series A Led by Bessemer to Bring AI Voice Agents to Enterprise

Helping enterprises over this challenge, Vapi, a leading developer platform for deploying Voice AI agents, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz.

Y Combinator
Jun 6th, 2024
Vapi: Voice AI for developers. | Y Combinator

Voice AI for developers. Founded in 2020 by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta, Vapi has 2 employees based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Vapi is hiring for 2 roles in engineering.