{"id":69192,"url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-product-engineer","title":"Senior Product 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":"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":"ElevenLabs","optional":false},{"name":"Figma","optional":false},{"name":"Lovable","optional":false},{"name":"Realm","optional":false},{"name":"Replit","optional":false},{"name":"Runway","optional":false},{"name":"Stripe","optional":false},{"name":"Django","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-09-15T23:59:02Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-09-15","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T19:54:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":396,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":396},"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\nCX has an unusually high important in a product like Sphere. Trust is of utmost importance when handling a company's payments and tax obligations. As a result, every user experience, modal, button, export needs to be flawless (would you trust Stripe with your payments if it was full of bugs and inconsistencies?).\nSphere is looking for a passionate founding product engineer to own our CX, take it to the next level and help build out new features / products on our roadmap.\nThey’ll be working directly with customers, our design and eng team as well as our CEO / Founder to bring Sphere’s product vision of making the world one market to life.\nWHAT YOU'LL DO\nWithin weeks:\nWork / 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\n\nCollaborate extensively with design on bringing those features to life\n\nExecuting and shipping features, end-to-end, on a daily basis\n\nDoing customer support where necessary to understand our customers and how they think as much as possible\n\nWithin months:\nOwn Sphere's CX and make it unique\n\nOwn feature / product roadmap in conjunction with the CEO / Founder (you will work a lot together)\n\nBuild / implement more rigorous customer feedback / analysis processes to allow us to better prioritize roadmap\n\nREQUIREMENTS\nStrong experience with React. Our entire front end is built in react.\n\nStrong experience with Figma. In order to collaborate efficiently with design.\n\nCustomer 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.\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\nStrong organization skills. We get hundreds of feature requests every day. How you monitor, organize and prioritize these is key.\n\nNICE TO HAVES\nExperience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!\n\nExperience in Python and Django. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django\n\nExperience using tools like PostHog and Sentry\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":4823,"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":"2025-09-15T23:59:02Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.133,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":396,"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-product-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/sphere-senior-product-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T23:02:22Z","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":1248,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"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-product-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-senior-product-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-senior-product-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-senior-product-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsphere-senior-product-engineer"}]}