Senior Backend Engineer (Infrastructure)

Compensation

$230K – $280K • Offers Equity

Why this is a massive opportunity:

We're using AI to codify the world's international trade law. Every business around the world needs this. Compliance isn’t optional. Strong macro tailwinds: Businesses are expanding globally at a faster pace, while tax authorities are cracking down on cross-border compliance, driving urgent demand. AI advantage: Incumbents can’t scale beyond the U.S.; our AI-native tax engine can. Multi product play: Indirect tax is just the start; we’re building a compound startup that helps business with all forms of revenue-based compliance.

What you will do:

Within weeks:

• Find solutions to Sphere's toughest scaling, performance, and latency problems

• Work closely with engineering team to define tooling to help us ship even faster

• Participate in an On Call rotation to solve critical production events

• Work directly with customers like Eleven Labs, Replit, Windsurf, and partners like Stripe, Chargebee, on their 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 introduce and scale best practices with cloud-native technologies like Amazon ALB, ECS/EKS, Temporal, AWS SQS, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Elasticache Redis, and S3

• Build abstractions within Terraform to simplify the architecture and increase velocity and ownership

Requirements:

• Experience managing k8s clusters in AWS/GCP/Azure at scale

• Extensive experience shipping high-quality architectures for mission critical systems (focus on high availability, high load, low latency)

• Experience with Postgres at scale

Nice to have:

• Experience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!

• Strong experience in Python. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django

• Passionate about developer experience

• Very strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.

What’s important to us:

• The Dog: Grit > pedigree.

• Ship fast: If it can be done today, do it today.

• Self-starter: No hand-holding

• Accountability: You’ll be held accountable to objective, measurable targets each month.

• In-person: SF only.