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Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

Vapi · San Francisco, California

Location
San Francisco, California, United States
Workplace
Hybrid
Employment
Full time
Level
Staff
Posted
5 months ago

About this role

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

Our Enterprise ARR is growing ~5x YoY - customers like NYLife and Intuit deploy in weeks and expand rapidly when we support them well. We're hiring an FDE to be the reason that flywheel spins faster. You won't just onboard customers; you'll identify the next use case, build the tooling that makes the next similar deployment trivial, and close the gap between what our product can do and what our customers actually need.

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

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

Requirements

  • 5+ years of professional engineering experience

  • Strong generalist: you can move between UI/UX implementation, API design, data modeling, and systems architecture

  • Has worked at a company with fewer than 50 people

  • 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

  • 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

    Soft Skills (in priority order)

    1. Agency - you move things forward without waiting for instructions

    2. Structured Thinking - you break down complex, ambiguous problems into clear next steps

    3. Customer Communication - you can explain hard things to both engineers and executives

    4. Cross-Functional Collaboration - you work fluidly with Product, GTM, and Engineering

    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

    As published by Vapi. Applications are handled on their site.

    Skills this posting mentions

    Artificial IntelligenceSolution ArchitectureEarly-Stage

    About Vapi

    Voice AI for developers. Vapi lets developers build, test and deploy voice agents in minutes rather than months. We’re building the infrastructure that helps developers close the gap between the raw model and voice AI in production.

    All 31 openings at Vapi

    One click, then it is written

    Apply to Vapi with a resume written for this role.

    Queue Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed and I read the posting, rewrite your resume against it, draft the cover letter, and score the fit. Then you press send, or press one button and I fill in Vapi’s form for you.

    1. 01Drop your resume

      A PDF or a LinkedIn URL. About a minute, once.

    2. 02I rank the openings

      Every weekday morning, the live catalog scored against your history. Up to 20 worth your time, not two hundred links.

    3. 03Each one is written up

      Resume rewritten for the posting, a cover letter, a fit score. Press send, or let me fill in the form.

    • 25 sent a week, free
    • No card
    • Nothing sent until you say so

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    Put this to work

    Paste your career in once. Every application after that is written for you.

    Drop a resume or a LinkedIn URL. I rank the live openings against it, rewrite the resume and write a cover letter for the best of them, and fill in the employer's form when you press the button. You read, you decide what goes out.

    1. 01Drop your resume

      A PDF or a LinkedIn URL. About a minute, once.

    2. 02I rank the openings

      Every weekday morning, the live catalog scored against your history. Up to 20 worth your time, not two hundred links.

    3. 03Each one is written up

      Resume rewritten for the posting, a cover letter, a fit score. Press send, or let me fill in the form.

    • New matches ranked and written before you are up.
    • Every bullet stays inside what your history supports. Nothing invented.
    • Queued, submitted, interviewing, offer: one screen, not a spreadsheet.

    500 free credits on sign-up. No card. Nothing is sent until you say so.

    Listed from the job board Vapi publishes. Refolk is not the employer and does not handle their hiring. Applications go to Vapi directly.