Member of Technical Staff – Core Backend

Vapi

Backend developer enhancing real-time voice AI infrastructure for a platform serving billion calls. StreamModule pipeline responsibilities focusing on performance and reliability improvements.

Posted 6/3/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $200,000 - $280,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

JavaScriptKafkaNode.jsPostgresTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Ramp on the StreamModule pipeline and the cork/uncork backpressure model. Walk the Oct 15 / Oct 22 DB incidents and the duplicate-message incident. Land a scoped pipeline or provider-abstraction improvement.
Own a slice of the BullMQ → Kafka consolidation. 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. Be the backend owner that agents and FDE teams pull in for design reviews on new providers and pipeline changes.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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. The codebase is huge NestJS, but a strong systems-thinking engineer ramps fast — language doesn’t gate the hire.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

real-time systemsstreaming systemsevent-driven backendsqueue architectureplugin architectureadapter architecturePostgresOpenTelemetryTypeScriptNode.js

Soft Skills

systems thinkingdesign reviews