Member of Technical Staff, Release Engineer

Vapi•San Francisco, CA

5d•$235,000 - $264,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Vapi is seeking a senior/staff engineer to join their team as a Release Engineer. The company experiences a high volume of pull requests daily and serves large enterprises, requiring a fast, safe, observable, and predictable release process. This role is critical for maintaining Vapi's CI and deployment systems, which are essential product infrastructure. The engineer will be responsible for removing bottlenecks, improving deployment paths, and increasing confidence in releases without hindering product teams. The focus will be on CI/CD, testing, and deployment safety, rather than primary incident response.

Requirements

Evidence of owning critical CI/CD or release infrastructure at meaningful scale and driving measurable cross-team improvements.
Strong distributed-systems fundamentals and the ability to diagnose failures across build, test, deployment, and infrastructure layers.
Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes-based delivery systems and infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Argo CD, Terraform, and Atlantis or comparable systems.
A habit of automating repetitive work, investing in testing and passive defenses, and using data to prove that a system became faster or more reliable.
Deep curiosity and the ability to gather context quickly, form a clear point of view, and keep pace as the architecture and product evolve.
A low-ego teammate who communicates clearly and owns outcomes.
Familiarity with AI coding tools is expected.

Nice To Haves

Experience as an SRE.
Experience with development frameworks like multi-agent workflows.
Programming languages like TypeScript and Go.

Responsibilities

Map Vapi’s release architecture end to end.
Partner with product and infrastructure engineers.
Baseline CI/test/deploy performance.
Identify the biggest failure modes.
Ship an initial improvement to the release process.
Own the release-tooling roadmap and operating health.
Remove the costliest CI/deploy bottlenecks.
Improve observability and diagnosis of release systems.
Automate slow or failure-prone workflows.
Establish a repeatable model for safe, fast releases with measurable gains in validation time, deploy speed, and reliability.
Deliver self-service workflows and guardrails.
Set the longer-term release-infrastructure roadmap.
Own systems behind safe releases, including Argo CD, Terraform, and Atlantis.
Automate the reliable path for releases.