other
Posted YesterdayMember of Technical Staff, Core Backend
at Vapi
San Francisco, United StatesRemote
Responsibilities
- Ship event-driven OTEL instrumentation for at least one critical pipeline stage.
Requirements
- Voice AI that resolves, not transfers.
- You’ll consolidate BullMQ into Kafka, harden the provider abstractions (LLM, STT, TTS base classes), instrument the pipeline with event-driven OTEL tracing, and shore up the Postgres SPOFs that contributed to the Oct 15 and Oct 22 incidents.
- Who You Are: 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.
- Tech stack you’ll work in: - Languages: TypeScript on Node.js (primary).
- - Framework: NestJS (large codebase).
- - Queues: BullMQ (current), Kafka (target — consolidation on roadmap), Temporal.
- - Database: Postgres (connection pooling, read replicas), Liquibase for schema migrations.
- Where you likely come from: A streaming or real-time platform (Discord, Slack, Zoom, Twitch, Mux, LiveKit), an ML-infra company (Modal, Baseten, Replicate, Together), or a pipeline/workflow shop (Temporal, Stripe Radar, trading systems).
Benefits
- Total raised: $72M Why We’re Hiring This Role: The StreamModule pipeline — VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport — runs on cork/uncork backpressure during live phone calls.
- Why Vapi: Generational impact: Build the human interface for every business Ownership culture: 70% of the company are previous founders Kind team: The founders, Jordan and Nikhil, are Canadians Tier-1 Investors: YC, KP seed, Bessemer Series A, Recent Series B raise What We Offer: 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