Role Overview
We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our infrastructure team. As a key member of our engineering organisation, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining our backend infrastructure to support our mission-critical billing flows.
Why this is a massive opportunity:
- Massive TAM: Every business around the world needs this. Compliance isn't optional.
- Strong macro tailwinds: Businesses are expanding globally at a faster pace, while tax authorities are cracking down on cross-border compliance, driving urgent demand.
- AI advantage: Incumbents can't scale beyond the U.S.; our AI-native tax engine can.
- Multi product play: Indirect tax is just the start; we're building a compound startup that helps business with all forms of revenue-based compliance.
What you will do:
- Within weeks:
- Find solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems
- Work closely with engineering team 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 organisation 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
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.
What's important to us:
- The Dog: Grit > pedigree.
- Ship fast: If it can be done today, do it today.
- Self-starter: No hand-holding
- Accountability: You'll be held accountable to objective, measurable targets each month.
- In-person: SF only.
About Sphere
Sphere is building AI-native trade infrastructure. We help companies like Lovable, Eleven Labs, Replit and Deel automate their sales tax, VAT, GST compliance obligations.
What makes us different to other vendors on the market is:
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we have spent the last 2 years building local rails into tax authorities in both the US and internationally to properly automate compliance processes (no other vendor has done this), and
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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).
Compensation Range
$230K – $280K
