Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure

Vapi; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

A pioneering voice technology firm in San Francisco is seeking a Founding Senior Engineer to scale its real-time conversational infrastructure. This role requires a strong engineering background with a minimum of 8 years experience, especially in Infrastructure and DevOps. Candidates should be ready to initiate projects within tight deadlines and demonstrate skills in distributed systems and Kubernetes. You will be instrumental in building a robust culture and driving essential scalability projects.

Qualifications

• Previous Founding/Infrastructure/DevOps Engineer.
• 1+ year of experience with a seed or Series A company.
• 3+ years of experience in Infrastructure.
• 8+ years experience in Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own scalability projects end-to-end.
• Build monitoring for real-time alerts on latency spikes.
• Build anti-fragility into the infrastructure.

Skills

JavaScript

Kubernetes

Node.js

Rust

TypeScript

Distributed Systems

Job description

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Engineering

Compensation

• Engineering $150K – $265K • Offers Equity

Vision

We're creating the shift to voice as humanity's default interface. Why voice? Because voice captures the nuance, the emotion, and the humanity of interactions in ways text alone can't: voice makes technology human again.

Mission

We're building the platform for the future of voice technology. Our market edge is extensible, reliable infrastructure designed for the full complexity of voice interactions. 18 months, 150k developers, adding 1000 every day. Give it a try here

The Role

The Founding Senior Engineer (Infra) will be responsible for scaling Vapi’s real‑time conversational infrastructure to millions of concurrent calls, while ensuring every call gets picked up within 1s with 99.9% reliability. You’ll also be a foundational part of how we build the culture at Vapi.

Outcomes

1. Own scalability projects end‑to‑end
   • Ship a pre‑scoped project within the first 7 days (eg. redis HA)
   • Ship a project independently within the first 30 days (eg. new CRD for managing worker pools)
2. Build monitoring
   • Ship pre‑defined monitoring goals within the first 14 days (eg. prometheus rules)
   • Ship monitoring independently within the first 30 days (eg. refactor call monitoring to real‑time alert on latency spikes)
3. Build anti‑fragility into the infrastructure
   • Unprompted, build things that make our infrastructure more antifragile (eg. auto multi‑cluster rollover).

Competencies

• Experience with Kubernetes, Pulumi, or scaling other distributed systems
• Communication: You can clearly articulate what you’re thinking and feeling
• Cracked‑ness: You’re more cracked than the most cracked person on the team
• Startup Ready: You have a reason to be here and can make sacrifices for something uncertain
• Founder Juice: New ideas come from you, you build it yourself or annoy everyone until it’s done ;)

Qualifications

• Previous Founding/Infrastructure/DevOps Engineer
• 1+ year of experience with a seed or Series A company
• 3+ years of experience in Infrastructure
• 8+ years experience in Engineering

Skills

JavaScript, Kubernetes, Node.js, Rust, TypeScript, Distributed Systems

Compensation Range: $150K - $265K