{"id":262916,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2","title":"Senior Backend Engineer (Infrastructure)","company":{"id":920,"name":"Sphere","domain":"getsphere.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/sphere","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","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":180000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon Aurora","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Replit","optional":false},{"name":"Runway","optional":false},{"name":"Stripe","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Windsurf","optional":false},{"name":"Django","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-05T12:02:47Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-21","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T04:17:31Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":53,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":53},"description":"Mission:\nSphere 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:\nWe'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\nWe’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)\nWe'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)\nWe're well funded by Felicis Ventures and YC\nAs 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.\nGiven 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\nWhy this is a massive opportunity:\nMassive TAM: Every business around the world needs this. Compliance isn’t optional.\nStrong macro tailwinds: Businesses are expanding globally at a faster pace, while tax authorities are cracking down on cross-border compliance, driving urgent demand.\nAI advantage: Incumbents can’t scale beyond the U.S.; our AI-native tax engine can.\nProduct vision: Indirect tax is just the start; we’re building the Deel for international billing.\nWhat you will do:\nWithin weeks:\nFind solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems\nWork closely with engineering teamdevelopers to define tooling to help us ship even faster\nParticipate in an On Call rotation to solve critical production events\nWork directly with customers like Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, and partners like Stripe, Chargebee, on their latency and availability requirements.\nWithin months:\nInfluence and implement the next generation of Sphere's database, real-time queue, and container orchestration infrastructure\nWork 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\nBuild abstractions within Terraform to simplify the architecture and increase velocity and ownership\nWhat’s important to us:\nThe Dog: Grit > pedigree.\nShip fast: If it can be done today, do it today.\nSelf-starter: No hand-holding\nAccountability: You’ll be held accountable to objective, measurable targets each month.\nIn-person: SF only.\nRequirements:\nExperience managing k8s clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure at scale\nExtensive experience shipping high-quality architectures for mission critical systems (focus on high availability, high load, low latency)\nExperience with Postgres at scale\nNice to have:\nExperience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!\nStrong experience in Python. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django\nPassionate about developer experience \nVery strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3433,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":6,"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":["Accounting & Tax Software","Tax Advisory & Preparation"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T12:02:47Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":22,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.499,"p_room":0.45,"age_days":53,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:1","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-29T07:56:30Z","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":12129,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-30T00:00:00Z"}},"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":920},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=920"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2"},{"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-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2"},{"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-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2"},{"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-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":262916}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"getsphere.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":262916},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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