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    <job>
      <externalid>b5cca71a-e89</externalid>
      <Title>Founding Forward Deployed Engineer</Title>
      <Description><![CDATA[<p>As the Founding Forward Deployed Engineer at Sphere, you&#39;ll embed directly with Sphere&#39;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.</p>
<p>You won&#39;t just be executing a playbook, you&#39;ll be defining it as you go. Working directly with our Founder, Engineering team, and GTM teams, you&#39;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.</p>
<p>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&#39;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.</p>
<p><strong>Enablement</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Onboard customers pre-contract, get accounts functional in Sphere</li>
<li>Navigate customer billing system integrations</li>
<li>Pull and interpret liability reports, help customers understand exposure</li>
<li>Guide clients through the complexity of understanding and managing their global tax liability</li>
<li>Guide customers through VAT ID collection, address hygiene, and regional compliance</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Monetization</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Bridge between customer needs and the engineering roadmap</li>
<li>Be entrenched with the customer by ensuring Sphere is integral to all of the company’s revenue compliance needs</li>
<li>Research new compliance requirements (e-invoicing, input tax, etc.) end to end</li>
<li>Identify patterns across customers - what custom work is being requested repeatedly</li>
<li>Scope and write tight technical PRDs/proposals ready to hand to core engineering</li>
<li>Build custom features and integrations on top of the Sphere platform for key accounts</li>
<li>Identify custom builds that could be scaled and deployed across all customers as new features or products</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Requirements</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Experience in an FDE or customer-facing engineering role.</li>
<li>Experience executing and shipping bespoke customer features, end-to-end.</li>
<li>Ownership. Takes a problem from ambiguous to shipped without being told how, keeps the customer outcome in sight the whole way, and doesn&#39;t drop threads.</li>
<li>Relentlessly curious. You don&#39;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.</li>
<li>Strong communication skills. We work at an extremely fast pace, so clear, concise communication is essential.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Very strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers, this is a non-negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Nice to haves</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Experience working with large volumes of transaction data. You’ll be getting very familiar with it!</li>
<li>Experience in Python and Django. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django</li>
<li>Experience with React. Our entire front end is built in React.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Who you are</strong></p>
<p>You&#39;ll thrive here if:</p>
<ul>
<li>You&#39;re a Dog. You&#39;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.</li>
<li>Early stage is in your bones. You&#39;ve built things where there&#39;s no playbook and nobody handing you the answer. You define the problem instead of waiting for instructions.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>You believe speed and accuracy are both possible. We&#39;re building a complex product that requires robustness and 100% uptime, and we have to build at our customers&#39; pace. Move fast. Don&#39;t break things. Both.</li>
</ul>
<p>This won&#39;t be a fit if:</p>
<ul>
<li>You need structure handed to you or ambiguity feels draining rather than motivating</li>
<li>You want to manage people more than own hard problems (we&#39;re a flat, experienced team , everyone builds)</li>
<li>You&#39;re used to &quot;good enough&quot; shipping (small errors have outsized impact here)</li>
</ul>
<p style="margin-top:24px;font-size:13px;color:#666;">XML job scraping automation by <a href="https://yubhub.co">YubHub</a></p>]]></Description>
      <Jobtype>Full time</Jobtype>
      <Experiencelevel></Experiencelevel>
      <Workarrangement>onsite</Workarrangement>
      <Salaryrange>&quot;,   &quot;salaryMin&quot;: &quot;&quot;,   &quot;salaryMax&quot;: &quot;&quot;,   &quot;salaryCurrency&quot;: &quot;&quot;,   &quot;salaryPeriod&quot;: &quot;</Salaryrange>
      <Skills>FDE, customer-facing engineering, Python, Django, React, global trade law compliance, jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements</Skills>
      <Category>Engineering</Category>
      <Industry>Technology</Industry>
      <Employername>Sphere</Employername>
      <Employerlogo>https://logos.yubhub.co/sphere.com.png</Employerlogo>
      <Employerdescription>Sphere built a system that solves global trade law compliance. It&apos;s backed by a16z and YC, with $21M Series A funding and 30%+ month-over-month growth.</Employerdescription>
      <Employerwebsite>https://sphere.com</Employerwebsite>
      <Compensationcurrency></Compensationcurrency>
      <Compensationmin></Compensationmin>
      <Compensationmax></Compensationmax>
      <Applyto>https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/7b5f39b0-6f3f-4bc4-9469-74ae9722d85a</Applyto>
      <Location>San Francisco HQ</Location>
      <Country></Country>
      <Postedate>2026-04-24</Postedate>
    </job>
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