Member of Technical Staff, Site Reliablity Engineer

Vapi Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and equity ownership

Comprehensive health coverage

Flexible time off

Quarterly off-sites

Annual L&D budget

Job summary

Vapi Inc. in San Francisco is seeking an individual who will enhance call completion rates and manage service reliability. This role involves hands-on engineering with Go and TypeScript, focusing on building platform services and driving best practices in incident management.

As part of a small team, you’ll face real-time challenges impacting users directly. Experience in Kubernetes orchestration and a background in latency-sensitive products is required. Join us for a flexible work culture and substantial equity ownership.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in incident command and postmortem discipline.
• Experience with SLOs and error budgets.
• Expertise in capacity planning and load testing.
• Fluency in Kubernetes production ops.

Responsibilities

• Join the oncall rotation and define SLOs.
• Manage error budgets and alerting.
• Ship a platform service in Go or TypeScript.

Skills

Incident command

Capacity planning

Load testing

Kubernetes

Autoscaling patterns

Tools

Go

TypeScript

Prometheus

Grafana

Chronosphere

Job description

Voice AI that resolves, not transfers.

Most phone systems trap callers in menus and scripts. Vapi is the platform for deploying voice agents that know your business and can listen, adapt, and resolve in minutes.

• The numbers: 1 billion calls. 1 million developers. 10x enterprise ARR growth

• The customers: Amazon Ring, ServiceTitan, New York Life, Intuit, Kavak, and thousands more, from YC startups to the Fortune 500

• The news: a $50M Series B led by Peak XV Partners, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund), Y Combinator, and our earlier backers. Total raised: $72M

Why We’re Hiring This Role:

• 99.99% call completion is the number this role drives. Vapi runs live phone calls — a p99 spike means callers drop. We’ve had 15 stability-gap outages worth learning from, and we need someone who runs incident command, owns SLOs and error budgets, and builds the reliability culture from scratch.

• This is not a bash-and-YAML role. You’ll ship code (Go or TypeScript) for services that monitor and manage the platform: auto-remediation, capacity forecasters, oncall tooling. Capacity planning, load testing, and KEDA-based autoscaling for Vapi’s wscaler and workerpool-cron-scaler are on your plate.

What You’ll Do:

• 30 Day: Join the oncall rotation. Walk the 15 stability-gap incidents and turn the patterns into a prioritized reliability backlog. Define the first set of SLOs for the call-completion path.

• 60 Day: Stand up error budgets and SLO-based alerting in Chronosphere/Prometheus for the highest-impact services. Run the first proper load test against provider rate limits and per-org concurrency. Tune autoscaling for wscaler / workerpool-cron-scaler.

• 90 Day: Ship a real platform service — capacity forecaster, auto-remediation, or oncall tooling — in Go or TypeScript. Own the postmortem process. Drive a measurable improvement in p99 call completion or MTTR.

Who You Are:

Must-haves

• You’ve run incident command and postmortem discipline at scale on a real oncall rotation.

• You’ve operated SLOs and error budgets in Chronosphere, Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog.

• You’ve done capacity planning and load testing for production systems with real users.

• You’re fluent in Kubernetes production ops: pod crash diagnosis, HPA/VPA tuning, PodDisruptionBudgets, graceful shutdown.

• You know backpressure and autoscaling patterns — KEDA, custom metrics scaling.

Nice-to-haves

• You ship code, not just scripts. You can build platform services in Go or TypeScript (matches Vapi’s cluster-manager, database-health, wscaler, incidentManager).

• Real-time / latency-sensitive product background where degraded means a dropped call, not a slow dashboard.

Tech stack you’ll work in

• Languages: Go and TypeScript (you ship code, not just scripts), Bash.

• Observability: Chronosphere, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry.

• Orchestration: Kubernetes on EKS — production ops (HPA/VPA tuning, PodDisruptionBudgets, graceful shutdown, pod crash diagnosis).

• Autoscaling and backpressure: KEDA, custom metrics scaling (matches Vapi’s wscaler and workerpool-cron-scaler).

• Load testing: script-based load testing, provider rate-limit auditing, per-org concurrency auditing.

• Vapi services you’ll touch or build: cluster-manager, database-health, wscaler, incidentManager.

Where you likely come from

• A real-time / latency-sensitive product (Discord, Zoom, Mux, Twitch, Twilio, LiveKit, Cloudflare, a trading firm, a gaming backend), or a FAANG SRE / Production Engineer (Google, Uber, Twitter/X, Meta) who misses being hands‑on.

• Weak fit: SRE from analytics or CRM backends where “degraded” means a slow dashboard, not a dropped call. Anyone uncomfortable reading or writing code.

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, KP seed, Bessemer Series A

What We Offer:

• Real stake: We offer a competitive salary and excellent equity ownership

• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision plans

• Team love: We love hanging out, and we do quarterly off‑sites

• Flexible time off: take what you need

More: catered meals, transportation, gym, and a $10k annual L&D budget