Sphere
Overview
Mission:
Sphere has built the world’s first AI-native tax engine that helps companies automate their sales tax, VAT and GST obligations. Sphere is scaling to support millions of customer transactions globally, requiring scalable infrastructure for transaction syncing and live tax calculation within checkout and invoices. We are a key part of mission-critical billing flows, so availability, resilience and speed are paramount. We are well funded by Felicis Ventures and YC, and our customers include Eleven Labs, Replit, Runway AI, Windsurf, and many others. Why this is a massive opportunity
The market is enormous: this is a must-have solution for every business worldwide. If businesses don’t collect and remit indirect tax, they pay later. Strong macro tailwinds: businesses are going global earlier and cross-border compliance is more demanding; tax authorities are tightening enforcement. AI has changed the game by enabling automation of tax research and compliance more broadly. Our product vision is to build the foundation for a broader cross-border compliance platform (think Deel for international billing). Product vision: We aim to be the Deel for international billing by building an AI-native tax engine that supports input tax, withholding tax and customs as part of a broader platform. What you will do
Within weeks: Find solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems Work closely with engineering teams to define tooling to help ship faster Participate in an On Call rotation to solve critical production events Collaborate with customers like Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, and partners like Stripe and Chargebee on 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 organization to scale cloud-native technologies (Amazon ALB, ECS/EKS, Temporal, AWS SQS, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Elasticache Redis, S3) Build abstractions within Terraform to simplify architecture and increase velocity and ownership What’s important to us
The Dog: We value hustle and practical results over credentials; the most capable person in a corner will outperform a credentialed but less tenacious candidate. Shipping Fast: We operate with intensity and speed; this role is not focused on work-life balance. In person: All roles are in SF only, which accelerates momentum and collaboration. Accountability: Everyone is responsible for something on the platform and performance is measured objectively. Self-starter: You will move across different areas of the platform and must figure things out independently. Requirements
Experience managing Kubernetes clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure at scale Extensive experience shipping high-quality architectures for mission-critical systems (high availability, high load, low latency) Experience with Postgres at scale Nice to have
Experience working with large volumes of transaction data Strong experience in Python; core backend and data pipelines are Python/Django Passionate about developer experience Very strong attention to detail, especially with numbers
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Mission:
Sphere has built the world’s first AI-native tax engine that helps companies automate their sales tax, VAT and GST obligations. Sphere is scaling to support millions of customer transactions globally, requiring scalable infrastructure for transaction syncing and live tax calculation within checkout and invoices. We are a key part of mission-critical billing flows, so availability, resilience and speed are paramount. We are well funded by Felicis Ventures and YC, and our customers include Eleven Labs, Replit, Runway AI, Windsurf, and many others. Why this is a massive opportunity
The market is enormous: this is a must-have solution for every business worldwide. If businesses don’t collect and remit indirect tax, they pay later. Strong macro tailwinds: businesses are going global earlier and cross-border compliance is more demanding; tax authorities are tightening enforcement. AI has changed the game by enabling automation of tax research and compliance more broadly. Our product vision is to build the foundation for a broader cross-border compliance platform (think Deel for international billing). Product vision: We aim to be the Deel for international billing by building an AI-native tax engine that supports input tax, withholding tax and customs as part of a broader platform. What you will do
Within weeks: Find solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems Work closely with engineering teams to define tooling to help ship faster Participate in an On Call rotation to solve critical production events Collaborate with customers like Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, and partners like Stripe and Chargebee on 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 organization to scale cloud-native technologies (Amazon ALB, ECS/EKS, Temporal, AWS SQS, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Elasticache Redis, S3) Build abstractions within Terraform to simplify architecture and increase velocity and ownership What’s important to us
The Dog: We value hustle and practical results over credentials; the most capable person in a corner will outperform a credentialed but less tenacious candidate. Shipping Fast: We operate with intensity and speed; this role is not focused on work-life balance. In person: All roles are in SF only, which accelerates momentum and collaboration. Accountability: Everyone is responsible for something on the platform and performance is measured objectively. Self-starter: You will move across different areas of the platform and must figure things out independently. Requirements
Experience managing Kubernetes clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure at scale Extensive experience shipping high-quality architectures for mission-critical systems (high availability, high load, low latency) Experience with Postgres at scale Nice to have
Experience working with large volumes of transaction data Strong experience in Python; core backend and data pipelines are Python/Django Passionate about developer experience Very strong attention to detail, especially with numbers
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