{"id":69189,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure","title":"Senior Backend Engineer (Infrastructure)","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":"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":220000,"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":"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":"ElevenLabs","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Lovable","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","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},{"name":"Python","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-02-19T23:35:50Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-02-19","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T05:43:27Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":240,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":240},"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\nWHAT YOU'LL DO\nWithin weeks:\nFind solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems\n\nWork closely with engineering team to define tooling to help us ship even faster\n\nParticipate in an On Call rotation to solve critical production events\n\nWork directly with customers like Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, and partners like Stripe, Chargebee, on their latency and availability requirements.\n\nWithin months:\nInfluence and implement the next generation of Sphere's database, real-time queue, and container orchestration infrastructure\n\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\n\nBuild abstractions within Terraform to simplify the architecture and increase velocity and ownership\n\nREQUIREMENTS\nExperience managing k8s clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure at scale\n\nExtensive experience shipping high-quality architectures for mission critical systems (focus on high availability, high load, low latency)\n\nExperience with Postgres at scale\n\nNICE TO HAVES\nExperience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!\n\nStrong experience in Python. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django\n\nPassionate about developer experience\n\nVery strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.\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":4106,"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":"2026-02-19T23:35:50Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T17:02:12Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.133,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":239,"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-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-18T06:10:05Z","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":9260,"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-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure"},{"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"},{"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"},{"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\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsphere-senior-backend-engineer-infrastructure"}]}