Member of Technical Staff, Forward Deployed

Department: R&D

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $200K – $280K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

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