Senior Backend Engineer (Infrastructure) · Sphere

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:14:52 GMT
Engineering

Sphere · San Francisco HQ · $230K – $280K · onsite

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.