Job Overview
Location
San Francisco
Job Type
Full-time
Category
Software Engineering
Date Posted
June 13, 2026
Full Job Description
đź“‹ Description
- • Own the stability and pluggability of Vapi’s StreamModule pipeline — VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport — which processes live phone calls with sub-100ms latency constraints.
- • Consolidate the current BullMQ queue system into Kafka to improve scalability, durability, and backpressure handling across high-volume call streams.
- • Harden provider abstractions (LLM, STT, TTS) by designing clean base classes and decoupled implementations so new models or vendors can be added without modifying core pipeline code.
- • Instrument the entire call pipeline with event-driven OpenTelemetry tracing to enable precise latency and failure analysis, replacing reliance on raw logs.
- • Resolve Postgres SPOFs that caused production incidents on Oct 15 and Oct 22 by implementing connection pooling, read replicas, and automated schema migrations using Liquibase.
- • Debug and remediate backpressure cascades in real-time voice systems, ensuring call integrity under load and preventing duplicate message delivery.
- • Serve as the primary backend owner for design reviews when agent or FDE teams introduce new providers or pipeline changes.
- • Ship measurable improvements in pipeline reliability and latency within 90 days, directly impacting customer experience for enterprise clients like Amazon Ring, ServiceTitan, and New York Life.
- • Collaborate with teams to ensure the pipeline remains pluggable and extensible while maintaining strict real-time performance guarantees.
- • Ramp quickly on the existing NestJS codebase and cork/uncork backpressure model, understanding how live call flow interacts with queue buffering and model inference timing.
- • Document and evangelize best practices for plugin architecture, observability, and database resilience across engineering teams.
- • Maintain high availability for a system processing over 1 billion calls, serving 1 million developers and supporting Fortune 500 companies.
- • Work in a high-velocity environment where delays are audible and system failures directly impact customer trust and revenue.
- • Participate in incident post-mortems and implement preventive measures to avoid recurrence of past pipeline failures.
- • Balance innovation in provider integrations with the need for core system stability under extreme scale and real-time constraints.
🎯 Requirements
- • 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.
- • TypeScript + Node.js + NestJS (strong systems-thinking engineers ramp fast — language doesn’t gate the hire).
🏖️ Benefits
- • 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.
Skills & Technologies
See exactly how your profile matches this role — strengths, skill gaps, and what to do about them.
About Vapi Technologies Inc.
Vapi empowers developers to build and deploy advanced voice AI agents through a highly configurable, API-first platform. Serving a wide range of clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies, Vapi simplifies the creation of leading voice AI products and scales phone operations efficiently. The platform supports a global user base, evidenced by its multilingual capabilities in over 100 languages. With impressive traction, Vapi has powered over 300 million calls and launched more than 2.5 million assistants, highlighting its significant impact and reliability in the voice AI market.
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