Founding Senior Engineer (Backend)

About Vapi

Voice AI for developers

About the role

Company Overview

Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini are about to onboard 4 billion people to voice assistants that actually talk like people. This marks a new beginning for voice as the world’s default interface. We will all want voice everywhere. Businesses are not ready. Products are not ready.

We’re building the infrastructure that helps developers close the gap between the raw model and voice AI in production. Give it a try here.

We launched in March, scaled revenue, and raised this past week. We’re a small team of 6 and growing. We're building out the founding team in-person in SF to scale what’s working.

Mission

The Senior Engineer (Backend) will own features end-to-end from customer requests to their deployment, building on a modular API-first architecture, working within real-time low-latency constraints. You’ll also be a foundational part of how we build the culture at Vapi.

Outcomes

1. Own and deliver entire features + projects
   • Ship a pre-scoped feature within the first 7 days
   • Ship a feature independently within the first 30 days
2. Ship optimizations and refactors
   • Ship a pre-scoped optimization or refactor within the first 14 days
     1. Ex. improve the latency of a component of the speech-to-speech pipeline
   • Ship an optimization independently within the first 30 days
     1. Ex. refactor a tool-calling mechanism to make it more deterministic
3. Talk to customers
   • Receive a request from Support team and ship the fix within the first 14 days
   • Pick up customer threads unprompted, investigate and solve within the first 14 days
4. Build things that delight customers
   • Unprompted, delight a customer within the first 30 days (ex. call analytics endpoint)

Competencies

• Experience with Typescript + Node or similar backend framework
• Communication: You can clearly articulate what you’re thinking and feeling
• Cracked-ness: You’re more cracked than the most cracked person on the team
• Startup Ready: You have a reason to be here and can make sacrifices for something uncertain
• Founder Juice: New ideas come from you, you build it yourself or annoy everyone until it’s done ;)

Qualifications

• Previous Founding/Senior/Staff/Principal Engineer
• 1+ years of experience at company <100 ppl
• 5+ years experience in Full-Stack / Backend Software Engineering