Founding Product Engineer

Location

San Francisco HQ

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Engineering

Compensation

$230K – $260K • Offers Equity

ABOUT SPHERE

Every breakthrough in trade infrastructure has followed the same pattern: reduce a transaction cost, expand the market. Containerization for goods. SWIFT for money. Stripe for payments. Compliance is one of the last and largest — and the hardest, because trade rules aren't data to be looked up. They're a complex adaptive system with 190+ sovereign jurisdictions, in different languages, changing constantly, reacting to each other. Sphere built the system that solves it. Our AI (TRAM) ingests global trade law, interprets it, resolves conflicts across jurisdictions, and produces compliance determinations more reliable than human experts. We handle the entire lifecycle — calculation, registration, filing, remittance — at millisecond latency with zero downtime.

Backed by a16z and YC. $21M Series A, 30%+ month-over-month growth, customers include ElevenLabs, Replit, Deel, Runway, and Lovable.
Small team, global surface area. Everyone owns a domain that would be a full team at a larger company. San Francisco, five days in office.
The problem keeps compounding. Expanding into input tax, withholding, e-invoicing, tariffs — each multiplies the complexity. Tens of millions of transactions today, billions ahead.

THE ROLE

CX has an unusually high importance in a product like Sphere. Trust is of utmost importance when handling a company's payments and tax obligations. As a result, every user experience, modal, button, export needs to be flawless (would you trust Stripe with your payments if it was full of bugs and inconsistencies?). Sphere is looking for a passionate founding product engineer to own our CX, take it to the next level and help build out new features / products on our roadmap. They’ll be working directly with customers, our design and eng team as well as our CEO / Founder to bring Sphere’s product vision of making the world one market to life.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Within weeks:

Work / listen to many of our customers on what their main pain points are and prioritize lowest hanging fruit features that can help solve their problems
Collaborate extensively with design on bringing those features to life
Executing and shipping features, end-to-end, on a daily basis
Doing customer support where necessary to understand our customers and how they think as much as possible

Within months:

Own Sphere's CX and make it unique
Own feature / product roadmap in conjunction with the CEO / Founder (you will work a lot together)
Build / implement more rigorous customer feedback / analysis processes to allow us to better prioritize roadmap

REQUIREMENTS

Strong experience with React. Our entire front end is built in react.
Strong experience with Figma. In order to collaborate efficiently with design.
Customer obsession. You’re going to be talking to a lot of people in the finance realm (Controller, Heads of Finance, Heads of Tax). You need to like them and obsess over them.
Very strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.
Strong organization skills. We get hundreds of feature requests every day. How you monitor, organize and prioritize these is key.

NICE TO HAVES

Experience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!
Experience in Python and Django. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django
Experience using tools like PostHog and Sentry

WHO YOU ARE

You'll thrive here if:

You're a Dog. You've been underestimated, gone through struggle, and never stopped running. You have a chip on your shoulder and enormous drive. You look at Stripe, Deel, and Flexport all punting on compliance and think: good, that means the opportunity is ours. Hunger beats pedigree.
Early stage is in your bones. You've built things where there's no playbook and nobody handing you the answer. You define the problem instead of waiting for instructions.
You own it end to end. Give you a goal and you figure out your own path. Small team, global surface area — everyone owns a domain that would be a full team at a larger company. No one tells you how.
You believe speed and accuracy are both possible. We're building a complex product that requires robustness and 100% uptime, and we have to build at our customers' pace. Move fast. Don't break things. Both.
Being in the room is a feature, not a cost. Five days in SF isn't a policy; it's how the work gets done. The speed and density of collaboration we need doesn't survive over video.

This won't be a fit if:

You need structure handed to you or ambiguity feels draining rather than motivating
You want to manage people more than own hard problems (we're a flat,...