# Founding Product Engineer

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

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/bfa759a9-f19a-4030-959e-9e29d81d6879
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_e3f42db8-8ed

## Description

## Compensation

$230K – $280K • Offers Equity

## ABOUT SPHERE

Every 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.

## THE ROLE

CX has an unusually high importance 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?).

Sphere 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.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

Within weeks:

- Work / 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

- Collaborate extensively with design on bringing those features to life

- Executing and shipping features, end-to-end, on a daily basis

- Doing customer support where necessary to understand our customers and how they think as much as possible

Within months:

- Own Sphere's CX and make it unique

- Own feature / product roadmap in conjunction with the CEO / Founder (you will work a lot together)

- Build / implement more rigorous customer feedback / analysis processes to allow us to better prioritize roadmap

## REQUIREMENTS

- Strong experience with React. Our entire front end is built in react.

- Strong experience with Figma. In order to collaborate efficiently with design.

- 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.

- Strong organization skills. We get hundreds of feature requests every day. How you monitor, organize and prioritize these is key.

## 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 using tools like PostHog and Sentry

## 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.

- Being in the room is a feature, not a cost. Five days 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.

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)

- Being in the room five days a week feels like a cost instead of a benefit

## Skills

### Required
- React
- Figma
- Customer obsession
- Attention to detail
- Organization skills

### Nice to have
- Python
- Django
- PostHog
- Sentry