Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

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 Our Enterprise ARR has grown 10x — customers like Amazon Ring, NY Life and Intuit deploy in weeks and expand rapidly when we support them well. Customer deployments now consume most of our current FDE capacity, which means platform roadmap work competes directly with delivery. We're opening more seats this quarter in San Francisco and New York to take on that unowned roadmap work. Steady-state accounts are handing off to our Agent Engineering team so FDEs can return to building the platform, not just running it. Unlike a solutions engineer, an FDE ships code: into customer repos, into Vapi's GitOps configs, and into the Vapi platform itself. This isn't CRUD engineering. You're building real-time, latency-sensitive systems that orchestrate multiple providers — speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech, telephony — simultaneously, in production, at enterprise scale. It's the kind of systems problem most engineers only get to touch on infra teams at much larger companies, and you'll own it end to end. 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 WHAT YOU'LL OWN - Lead deployment engagements end to end for assigned enterprise customers, from scoping through go-live and handoff - Build production-ready Vapi deployments (assistants, squads, tools, structured outputs, telephony/SIP, webhooks, integrations) - Debug live production issues across call records, app logs, provider request/response, and infra metrics - Own customer-facing GitOps repos and dedicated cluster configuration - Manage technical and executive stakeholders across technical and non-technical audiences - Build platform work that removes deployment toil: outbound campaigns, evals and simulations, observability, CLI and MCP tooling - Feed deployment insight back into the product roadmap 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 - 5+ years of professional engineering experience - Strong generalist: you can move between UI/UX implementation, API design, data modeling, and systems architecture - Early-stage startup experience — you've worn multiple hats in a scrappy, resource-constrained environment - Can communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders - Conceptual understanding of working with AI in production 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 - 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 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