Mission:

Sphere has built the world’s first AI-native tax engine that helps companies like Eleven Labs, Replit, Runway AI, Windsurf (+ many more) automate their sales tax, VAT and GST obligations:

• We're growing rapidly (34%+ MoM revenue growth) and helping the fastest growing tech companies around the world including Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, Fathom, Linktree, Photoroom, Sierra AI, Zed etc
• We’ve spent the last 1.5 years building local rails into tax authorities in both the US and internationally to properly automate compliance processes (no other vendor has done this)
• We're building the world's first AI-native tax engine (which will be the foundation for a broader cross border compliance platform; think Deel for international billing)
• We're well funded by Felicis Ventures and YC

As Sphere scales to support millions of customer transactions globally, the need for scalable infrastructure to support transaction syncing and live tax calculation within checkout and invoices is paramount.

Given we are a key part of mission critical billing flows for some of the fastest growing companies in the world, availability, resilience and speed are all key areas of focus that this role would be responsible for

Why this is a massive opportunity:

🌍 The market is enormous: This is a ‘need to have’ solution for every business around the world. It’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore (see below) and if businesses don’t collect and remit indirect tax, they end up paying for it out of pocket later.

🌬️ Strong macro tailwinds: Businesses are going global earlier and earlier and they’re not equipped to deal with cross border compliance. Additionally, tax authorities are clamping down on cross border tax compliance which means demand for this solution will continue to grow (e.g. EU forcing payment processors to hand over tax evaders).

✨ AI has changed the game: a lot of processes related to tax compliance / research have been extremely manual and cumbersome to date. That’s why incumbents like Avalara, Vertex, Anrok haven’t been able to move outside the US. LLMs have changed that and can automate a lot of what tax researchers do.

🔮 Product vision: We believe that our AI-native tax engine will be the foundation of a broader cross border compliance platform that help businesses go global from day 1 (think input tax, withholding tax, customs). We want to be the Deel for international billing.

What you will do:

Within weeks:

• Find solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems
• Work closely with engineering teamdevelopers to define tooling to help us ship even faster
• Participate in an On Call rotation to solve critical production events
• Work directly with customers like Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, and partners like Stripe, Chargebee, on their latency and availability requirements.

Within months:

• Influence and implement the next generation of Sphere's database, real-time queue, and container orchestration infrastructure
• Work across our engineering organization to introduce and scale best practices with cloud-native technologies like Amazon ALB, ECS/EKS, Temporal, AWS SQS, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Elasticache Redis, and S3
• Build abstractions within Terraform to simplify the architecture and increase velocity and ownership

What’s important to us:

• The Dog: We place a lot of importance on how much you hustle vs which school / fancy company you went to - a trait we commonly refer to as the ‘Dog’. The person backed into a corner with something to prove will always beat the trust fund baby no matter what credentials they have.
• Shipping Fast: Our culture is characterized by intensity and speed. What has got us to where we are is a mentality of ‘if it can be done today, why wait for tomorrow’. If you’re looking for work life balance, this isn’t the role for you.
• In person: All roles are in person in SF only. Not only do we find that we can move 10x quicker with this model but it’s also 10x more fun.
• Accountability: Everyone is responsible for something on the platform and your performance will be measured objectively against it. That is sometimes daunting (especially in engineering) but that pressure brings out the best work in people
• Self-starter: We don’t have time to hold hands. You will be moving across different areas of the platform and context switching on a regular basis. You must know how to figure things out for yourself and keep on task.

Requirements:

• Experience managing k8s clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure at scale
• Extensive experience shipping high-quality architectures for mission critical systems (focus on high availability, high load, low latency)
• Experience with Postgres at scale

Nice to have:

• Experience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!
• Strong experience in Python. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django
• Passionate about developer experience
• Very strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.