Member of Technical Staff, Backend
The posting does not state a salary. This range is our estimate from the role, the location and the stack — treat it as a guide, not an offer.
- Level
- Senior
- Apply from
- United States
About the role
- Own backend product areas from concept to production.
- Develop APIs and services for voice AI applications.
- Collaborate with teams to improve reliability and observability.
- Use AI tools to enhance development speed and quality.
- Engage in customer-facing backend improvements.
Skills the posting asks for
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Postgres
Summarised from the employer’s posting, which is reproduced in full below.
The employer’s full posting
Vapi (/ˈVɑːpi/)
Must-haves
- 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!
- More than 1 million developers have built 2.7M+ agents on Vapi. Every assistant depends on a growing product surface—from Composer, Simulations, Monitoring, and Knowledge Base to Versioning and Deployments.
- Behind those experiences are hard backend product problems: durable APIs and data models, real-time and asynchronous workflows, observability, evaluations, guardrails, and reliable operation of non-deterministic systems.
- We’re hiring a backend product engineer to own those systems end to end and help customers move voice agents from a compelling demo to dependable production—at Fortune 500 scale. The work is genuinely hard and unusually fun.
- 30 Days: Make real calls and build real assistants across LLM, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and telephony integrations. Develop a working mental model of how Vapi’s product surfaces map to APIs, services, data systems, and production workflows, then ship your first scoped backend product improvement.
- 60 Days: Own a meaningful backend area in agent self-improvement, trust, or guardrails. Take a customer problem from product spec to shipped system—designing the API, services, and data model; defining evaluation and rollout criteria; and instrumenting the result. Use AI coding agents thoughtfully as a throughput and quality lever.
- 90 Days: Operate as an independent owner for a customer-facing backend area. Run the full improvement loop—authoring, evaluation, deployment, observation, and iteration—while improving reliability and developer experience. Be a core voice in product decisions and have multiple meaningful improvements in production.
Must-haves
- A track record operating at senior or staff scope: independently owning customer-facing backend product areas from an ambiguous problem through measurable production outcomes.
- Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript/Node.js, Go, or a comparable backend stack, plus the ability to design clear APIs, services, and data models.
- Experience building distributed or asynchronous systems with databases, queues, workflows, or event-driven patterns—and reasoning clearly about failure modes.
- Strong product judgment: you start with the user problem, turn incomplete requirements into a clear technical approach, and make tradeoffs based on customer impact.
- Production ownership: you care about testing, observability, reliability, incident response, safe rollouts, and what happens after launch.
- Regular, thoughtful use of AI-assisted development tools to improve speed and quality, paired with strong engineering judgment about the result.
- Self-direction, customer empathy, and clear communication. You stay hands-on, collaborate directly across functions, and remain accountable for outcomes.
- Experience with Postgres and high-volume, event-driven systems using queues or durable workflows such as BullMQ, Kafka, or Temporal.
- Experience with real-time systems, voice or telephony, LLM-powered products, or AI agents.
- Experience operating cloud-native services on AWS and Kubernetes/EKS.
- Experience building developer platforms, public APIs, SDKs, or dashboards used by technical customers.
- Experience at a fast-growing startup, building a zero-to-one product, or founding a company.
- Open-source contributions, public technical writing, or other evidence of craft beyond your day job.
- Build something worthy of love
- Craft matters. We aim to build products and experiences customers genuinely love, not just tolerate.
- Commit and follow through
- We finish what we start and build trust by being people others can count on.
- Why not today?
- We value urgency and momentum. The fastest path to customer value usually wins.
- Seek raw input
- We go directly to customers, data, and teammates instead of relying on summaries or assumptions.
- It’s our problem
- We operate as one team. We share credit, own mistakes together, and support each other when things get hard.
- Be direct and kind
- We give feedback clearly, respectfully, and without delay.
- Generational impact: Build the human interface for every business
- Ownership culture: Many of us are previous founders
- Kind team: The founders, Jordan and Nikhil, are Canadians
- Tier-1 investors: Peak XV (Series B), Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, M12, and Y Combinator
- 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, equipment, and a $10k annual L&D budgetMore: catered meals, transportation, gym, and a $10k annual L&D budget.