Vapi
Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure
San Francisco
- Salary
- $200K - $280K
- Level
- Staff
- Work type
- On-site · San Francisco
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 14 March 2026.
About the role
Vapi (/ˈVɑːpi/):
- Voice AI that resolves, not transfers
- Powering 1 billion calls for companies like Amazon Ring, Intuit, ServiceTitan, and New York Life
- Trusted by 1 million developers building the future of voice agents
- Backed by Peak XV, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, M12, Y Combinator, and more with $72M raised
- Try talking to Vapi now!
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
The team: Core Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 5 open in Core Engineering. 1 was posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in May: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Kubernetes (5 of 5), Golang (4 of 5), TypeScript (3 of 5), Argo CD (2 of 5), AWS (2 of 5), Bash (2 of 5), CI/CD (2 of 5)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Member of Technical Staff, Agentic Release Engineer posted Sep 22
- Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure Engineer posted Sep 12
- Member of Technical Staff, DevOps posted Jun 3
- Member of Technical Staff, Site Reliablity Engineer posted Jun 3
From the team and dates on Vapi's own job board.
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