{"id":69190,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-lead-ai-engineer","title":"Lead AI Engineer","company":{"id":28817,"name":"Sphere","domain":"sphere.com.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/sphere-com-ai","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":58,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0.692,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":250000,"max":280000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":280000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"ElevenLabs","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Lovable","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Replit","optional":false},{"name":"Runway","optional":false},{"name":"Stripe","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-10-07T05:47:03Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-10-07","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T23:13:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":375,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":374},"description":"ABOUT SPHERE\nEvery 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.\nSphere 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.\nBacked by a16z and YC. $21M Series A, 30%+ month-over-month growth, customers include ElevenLabs, Replit, Deel, Runway, and Lovable.\n\nSmall team, global surface area. Everyone owns a domain that would be a full team at a larger company. San Francisco, in office.\n\nThe problem keeps compounding. Expanding into input tax, withholding, e-invoicing, tariffs - each multiplies the complexity. Tens of millions of transactions today, billions ahead.\n\nTHE ROLE\nYou'll lead development of TRAM, our proprietary AI reasoning model that reads and interprets global trade law. This isn't a lookup problem, it's a reasoning problem - and it only became solvable with LLMs. You'll build the data pipelines that ingest legal sources, the model stack that produces structured evidence, the evaluation frameworks that measure accuracy, and the fine-tuning loops that improve performance. The unusual constraint: you need speed, scale, correctness, and robustness simultaneously - at millisecond latency, zero downtime, heading toward billions of transactions where a single error costs a customer $20K.\nWHAT YOU'LL DO\nWithin weeks:\nLead development of new features aimed at increasing TRAM’s test-time accuracy\n\nWork on the underlying data and retrieval pipelines that help power our AI workflows\n\nWork directly with our internal tax experts to understand how TRAM can better reason like them\n\nWithin months:\nOwn TRAM’s eval framework and workflows\n\nWork directly with leading frontier labs to reinforce fine tune models on our proprietary data\n\nREQUIREMENTS\nPrior experience building AI enabled products, particularly RAG systems\n\nExperience fine tuning base models, ideally via RFT\n\nWillingness to dive into tax technical problems - if you aren’t willing to dive deep on how the model should reason through the tax research process you won’t be effective\n\nA strong understanding of how LLMs and reasoning models function\n\nNICE TO HAVES\nExperience working with LLMs on legal applications\n\nExperience with RAG data pipelines and collecting/curating data for the pipeline\n\nWHO YOU ARE\nYou'll thrive here if:\nYou'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.\n\nEarly 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.\n\nYou 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.\n\nYou 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.\n\nBeing in the room is a feature, not a cost. Being 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.\n\nThis won't be a fit if:\nYou need structure handed to you or ambiguity feels draining rather than motivating\n\nYou want to manage people more than own hard problems (we're a flat, experienced team - everyone builds)\n\nYou're used to \"good enough\" shipping (small errors have outsized impact here)","description_format":"text","description_chars":4209,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["RegTech, AML & Compliance","Accounting & Tax Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2025-10-07T05:47:03Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.153,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":374,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":280000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-lead-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-lead-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T01:45:13Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2876,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-19T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":28817},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=28817"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsphere-lead-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fsphere-lead-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fsphere-lead-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/sphere-lead-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsphere-lead-ai-engineer"}]}