About the company
Vapi is a Voice AI platform that resolves, not transfers. Powering 1 billion calls for companies like Amazon Ring, Intuit, ServiceTitan, and New York Life. Trusted by 1 million developers. Backed by Peak XV, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, M12, Y Combinator, and more with $72M raised.
Responsibilities
- Own pipeline stability and pluggability for the StreamModule pipeline (VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport).
- Consolidate BullMQ into Kafka.
- Harden provider abstractions (LLM, STT, TTS base classes).
- Instrument the pipeline with event-driven OTEL tracing.
- Shore up Postgres SPOFs that contributed to incidents.
- Land a scoped pipeline or provider-abstraction improvement within 30 days.
- Own a slice of the BullMQ → Kafka consolidation within 60 days.
- Ship event-driven OTEL instrumentation for at least one critical pipeline stage.
- Harden one provider plugin path so a new model can be added without core changes.
- Drive a measurable reliability or latency win on the call path within 90 days.
- Be the backend owner that agents and FDE teams pull in for design reviews on new providers and pipeline changes.
Requirements
- Must-haves:
- You’ve built real-time or streaming systems in production — media pipelines, streaming data, or event-driven backends. You’ve debugged a backpressure cascade.
- You have opinions on queue architecture (BullMQ, Kafka, Temporal) and when each is the right fit.
- You’ve built plugin or adapter architectures — extending base classes cleanly, with decoupled implementations.
- You’ve operated Postgres at scale: connection pooling, read replicas, schema migrations (Liquibase or similar).
- You instrument with OpenTelemetry and think in event-driven traces, not just logs.
- Nice-to-haves:
- TypeScript + Node.js + NestJS. The codebase is huge NestJS, but a strong systems-thinking engineer ramps fast — language doesn’t gate the hire.
Conditions
- Competitive salary and excellent equity ownership.
- Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision plans.
- Quarterly off-sites.
- Flexible time off.
- Catered meals, transportation, gym, and a $10k annual L&D budget.