Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

As the Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Sphere, you'll embed directly with Sphere's most strategic customers to understand their cross-border business workflows, identify the highest-impact compliance challenges, and design and deliver custom solutions that make Sphere fit seamlessly into their operations.

You won't just be executing a playbook, you'll be defining it as you go. Working directly with our Founder, Engineering team, and GTM teams, you'll define how Sphere shows up in customer environments and shape what the forward-deployed motion looks like as we scale. This is a rare opportunity to have an outsized influence on both the product and the customer experience.

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive on owning problems end-to-end, from discovery to deployment, and who are energized by the challenge of translating intricate, jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements into elegant, production-grade software. We're looking for someone who is as comfortable in a customer conversation as they are in a codebase, and who brings the same rigor to building internal processes as they do to solving customer problems.

Enablement

• Onboard customers pre-contract, get accounts functional in Sphere
• Navigate customer billing system integrations
• Pull and interpret liability reports, help customers understand exposure
• Guide clients through the complexity of understanding and managing their global tax liability
• Guide customers through VAT ID collection, address hygiene, and regional compliance

Monetization

• Bridge between customer needs and the engineering roadmap
• Be entrenched with the customer by ensuring Sphere is integral to all of the company’s revenue compliance needs
• Research new compliance requirements (e-invoicing, input tax, etc.) end to end
• Identify patterns across customers - what custom work is being requested repeatedly
• Scope and write tight technical PRDs/proposals ready to hand to core engineering
• Build custom features and integrations on top of the Sphere platform for key accounts
• Identify custom builds that could be scaled and deployed across all customers as new features or products

Requirements

• Experience in an FDE or customer-facing engineering role.
• Experience executing and shipping bespoke customer features, end-to-end.
• Ownership. Takes a problem from ambiguous to shipped without being told how, keeps the customer outcome in sight the whole way, and doesn't drop threads.
• Relentlessly curious. You don't wait to be pointed at the answer - you go find it, and you know when to pull in someone who knows more than you.
• Strong communication skills. We work at an extremely fast pace, so clear, concise communication is essential.
• Customer 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.
• Very strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers, this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.

Nice to haves

• Experience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!
• Experience in Python and Django. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django
• Experience with React. Our entire front end is built in React.

Who you are

You'll thrive here if:

• You'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.
• Early 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.
• You 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.
• You 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.

This won't be a fit if:

• You need structure handed to you or ambiguity feels draining rather than motivating
• You want to manage people more than own hard problems (we're a flat, experienced team , everyone builds)
• You're used to "good enough" shipping (small errors have outsized impact here)