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Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure

Vapi · San Francisco, California

Location
San Francisco, California, United States
Employment
Full time
Level
Staff
Posted
12 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:

  • Vapi runs live phone calls - when something breaks, callers hear it. We’re building cell-based, multi-region infrastructure to drive 99.99% call completion, and this hire owns the foundation: multi-cluster Kubernetes on EKS, a stateful data plane (Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Temporal, ClickHouse), Envoy/Cilium networking, and multi-region Kafka on MSK across EU and ANZ.

  • You’ll write Go for control-plane services like cluster-manager, traffic-control-plane, and environment-manager, and you’ll set the bar for how Vapi runs stateful workloads at scale.

What You’ll Do:

  • 30 Day: 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.

  • 60 Day: 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.

  • 90 Day: 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.

Who You Are:

  • 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 (Postgres, 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.

  • Bonus: SIP / RTP / telephony background. The Nov 7 SIP gateway SPOF is still unsolved, and a telephony-savvy infra hire unblocks that roadmap item.

  • Bonus: cell-based / shard architecture experience - Shopify pods, AWS cell-based reference arch, Slack shards, or equivalent. Microservices experience alone isn’t the same.

  • You likely come from one of: a company that ran cell-based in prod (Shopify, AWS service teams, Slack); a distributed systems shop (Cockroach, MongoDB, Confluent, Temporal, Redpanda, ClickHouse Inc.); a voice/video/CPaaS company (Twilio, Plivo, Bandwidth, Vonage, LiveKit, Daily.co, Dialpad); an Envoy/service-mesh org (Lyft, Stripe, Airbnb, Pinterest, Isovalent/Cilium); or a streaming-infra team (Confluent, Uber, LinkedIn, Datadog) that ran MSK/Kafka multi-region.

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

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

Skills this posting mentions

Apache KafkaArtificial IntelligenceRedis

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, Infrastructure 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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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.