# Senior Backend Engineer (Infrastructure)

**Company**: Sphere
**Location**: San Francisco HQ
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: Full time
**Salary**: $230K – $280K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11312826

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/c7b17c18-2dde-4b83-a8a5-ff5effe94dd2?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_4892788f-14a

## Description

## 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.

## Skills

### Required
- k8s
- AWS/GCP/Azure
- Postgres
- Python
- Django
- Temporal
- AWS SQS
- Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
- Elasticache Redis
- S3

### Nice to have
- experience working with large volumes of transaction data
- strong experience in Python
- passionate about developer experience
- very strong attention to detail

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Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/c7b17c18-2dde-4b83-a8a5-ff5effe94dd2?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)