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

Sphere is looking for a passionate product engineer to help build out new features / products on our roadmap and take our customer experience to the next level.

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 becoming the world’s first cross-border compliance engine to life

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:

• 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 our 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

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:

• 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 have:

• 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