~/Jobs/Vapi/Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure_

Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure

Engineering, Product & DesignSan FranciscoOn-SiteFull-TimePosted 6 days ago

USD 20000k–28000k/yr

About the role

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:

Vapi runs live phone calls — when something breaks, callers hear it. We’re building cell-based, multi-region infrastructure to drive 99.99% call completion, and this hire owns the foundation: multi-cluster Kubernetes on EKS, a stateful data plane (Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Temporal, ClickHouse), Envoy/Cilium networking, and multi-region Kafka on MSK across EU and ANZ.
You’ll write Go for control-plane services like cluster-manager, traffic-control-plane, and environment-manager, and you’ll set the bar for how Vapi runs stateful workloads at scale.

What You’ll Do:

30 Day: Ramp on the cell-based architecture, the regional EKS clusters (backend / networking / persistence / monitoring / models / kafka), and the Pulumi stacks. Shadow oncall, walk recent incidents (Envoy response flags, conntrack drops, cross-zone LB target resets), and own a first scoped infra change end-to-end.
60 Day: Take ownership of one core domain — e.g., multi-region MSK (regional topic naming, Pulumi drift, compliance constraints), the Postgres/Neon consolidation path, or programmatic cluster creation via Cluster API. Ship a control-plane improvement in Go and drive a measurable reliability or capacity win.
90 Day: Lead a roadmap pillar of the cell-based build-out: a new region, a stateful workload migration, or unblocking the SIP gateway SPOF. Operate as the infra owner other teams pull in for design reviews, and set the standards (runbooks, failure-domain modeling, capacity targets) the next infra hires inherit.

Who You Are:

You’ve run multi-cluster Kubernetes on EKS in production — backend, networking, persistence, monitoring, models, and kafka clusters per region — and you’ve used Cluster API or similar for programmatic cluster creation.
You’ve operated a stateful data plane (Postgres, Redis, Kafka, Temporal, etcd, ClickHouse) at scale — you’ve sharded it, migrated data between instances, and lived with the consequences.
You’re fluent in Envoy and Cilium/eBPF. You’re comfortable debugging Envoy response flags, conntrack drops, and cross-zone LB behavior. VPC/NAT/Cloudflare alone isn’t enough.
You’ve run multi-region Kafka on MSK in production — not just Kafka. You’ve dealt with regional topic naming, MSK Pulumi drift, and compliance constraints.
You write Go for control-plane services. Vapi’s cluster-manager, traffic-control-plane, and environment-manager are all Go, and you’re comfortable owning code in that stack.
Bonus: SIP / RTP / telephony background. The Nov 7 SIP gateway SPOF is still unsolved, and a telephony-savvy infra hire unblocks that roadmap item.
Bonus: cell-based / shard architecture experience — Shopify pods, AWS cell-based reference arch, Slack shards, or equivalent. Microservices experience alone isn’t the same.
You likely come from one of: a company that ran cell-based in prod (Shopify, AWS service teams, Slack); a distributed systems shop (Cockroach, MongoDB, Confluent, Temporal, Redpanda, ClickHouse Inc.); a voice/video/CPaaS company (Twilio, Plivo, Bandwidth, Vonage, LiveKit, Daily.co, Dialpad); an Envoy/service-mesh org (Lyft, Stripe, Airbnb, Pinterest, Isovalent/Cilium); or a streaming-infra team (Confluent, Uber, LinkedIn, Datadog) that ran MSK/Kafka multi-region.