Vapi is excited to welcome Jeff Liu as its VP of Engineering. Jeff has spent the better part of two decades building platform infrastructure and supporting the teams that run it.
He joins at a moment when the team is shipping new products and customers are running voice in production at scale. Jeff joined the team because he believes voice is the next wave of AI adoption, and because Vapi is building the platform that voice deployments run on rather than a single application on top of one. We sat down with him to talk about the path here, what he’s prioritizing first, and why he’s convinced voice is the future.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your career path leading up to Vapi.
I came to Vapi from Turing, where I was VP of Engineering, leading platform and infrastructure engineering for about five years. Before that I spent a year at LinkedIn as a senior engineering leader leading flagship product engineering, and before LinkedIn, six years at Google. That’s where I first moved into management, as a tech lead manager.
Earlier in my career, I was at Twitter and Splunk when both were still startups, and before that at a startup called Everdream that was acquired by Dell. So for almost two decades, I have mostly been building platforms and infrastructure at a scale, the work I grew up on and the work that carried me from engineer into leadership.
I built my career one step at a time, and I think that matters. I’ve done the jobs my team does now, and I’ve built systems that are scaled to support very large user bases.
What made Vapi stand out when you were deciding on your next move?
I’m passionate about voice AI, and I’ll say that plainly because it drove the decision. The models have reached a level where they can support voice, and I believe the next big wave of AI adoption will be built on that. You can already see it in the market. For the last couple of years, the strongest stories about AI actually landing inside a business have come from voice, and customer experience is the clearest example.
When I talked with the Vapi leadership team about where the company is going, that conviction matched what I was already seeing. Vapi is growing fast and sits at the frontier of where voice technology is headed. Other offers I saw focused on building a solution for one specific market, and I cared more about building a platform that supports a wide range of use cases.
You’ve spent years at Google and LinkedIn. What excites you about a company at this stage?
I started at startups, Everdream, then Splunk, then Twitter, all early in their life. I learned a lot from those years about how startups actually work and what they can do for a career that a big company can’t. After my time at Google and LinkedIn, I always knew I wanted to come back to that.
Vapi was the right answer. At this stage you can see your own fingerprints on the product and the platform, and I have a real chance to shape our strategy. The decisions you make this quarter decide what the company looks like in two years. That’s a lot harder to find once a company is large, and it’s the part I missed.
You’ve described Vapi as a platform; why does that framing matter to you?
The thing I took away from talking with the founders is that Vapi isn’t building one application. It’s building a platform that companies can build their businesses on. I see it as what AWS did for cloud computing, applied to voice.
That’s the kind of work I’ve done for most of my career, and the kind I’ve seen succeed at scale. Platform and infrastructure is how I grew from engineer to leader, and I’ve learned a lot over the years about what it takes to run one. I can bring those learnings to the next phase of this company. The technical fit and the market we’re going after lined up, and that’s what attracted me most.
What are your first priorities in coming into this role?
Number one is platform reliability and scalability. I view it as the most important part of running a platform, and we have to keep investing in it so Vapi can support what’s coming: ongoing product improvements and some high-impact launches in the next few quarters. Our first job is to build a platform reliable enough to carry our products.
The job is to keep operating like a platform: reliability as the foundation, with investments in efficiency and products so customers can get more done on Vapi with better quality at a lower cost. A platform earns its place when builders deliver more business value on it for less money than they’d spend anywhere else. That’s what we’ve built, and what we’ll keep building.
What do you do outside of work that keeps you grounded?
Most of my time outside work goes to my kids and my family.
The other thing is music. I wanted to learn an instrument for a long time and never had the chance until the pandemic, when I finally started on piano, then guitar. It took me a long while to get through my first song. I kept at it for a couple of years, picked up a few more, and the piano ended up making guitar much easier to learn afterward.
What I enjoy most isn’t just the playing, it’s the music theory. How chords and melody fit together to build a song, and how you have to design that on purpose. I see a lot of parallels between music and my work as an engineer. The melody carries the idea, and the chords are the platform you build underneath it so the idea can land. That comparison probably says something about how I think about work too.
