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  <jobs>
    <job>
      <externalid>e3f42db8-8ed</externalid>
      <Title>Founding Product Engineer</Title>
      <Description><![CDATA[<p><strong>Compensation</strong></p>
<p>$230K – $280K • Offers Equity</p>
<p><strong>ABOUT SPHERE</strong></p>
<p>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&#39;t data to be looked up. They&#39;re a complex adaptive system with 190+ sovereign jurisdictions, in different languages, changing constantly, reacting to each other.</p>
<p><strong>THE ROLE</strong></p>
<p>CX has an unusually high importance in a product like Sphere. Trust is of utmost importance when handling a company&#39;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?).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>WHAT YOU&#39;LL DO</strong></p>
<p>Within weeks:</p>
<ul>
<li>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</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Collaborate extensively with design on bringing those features to life</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Executing and shipping features, end-to-end, on a daily basis</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Doing customer support where necessary to understand our customers and how they think as much as possible</li>
</ul>
<p>Within months:</p>
<ul>
<li>Own Sphere&#39;s CX and make it unique</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Own feature / product roadmap in conjunction with the CEO / Founder (you will work a lot together)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Build / implement more rigorous customer feedback / analysis processes to allow us to better prioritize roadmap</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>REQUIREMENTS</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Strong experience with React. Our entire front end is built in react.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Strong experience with Figma. In order to collaborate efficiently with design.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<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>
</ul>
<ul>
<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>
<ul>
<li>Strong organization skills. We get hundreds of feature requests every day. How you monitor, organize and prioritize these is key.</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>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Experience in Python and Django. Our core application backend and data pipeline services are built with Python and Django</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Experience using tools like PostHog and Sentry</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>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<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>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>
<p>This won’t be a fit if:</p>
<ul>
<li>You need structure handed to you or ambiguity feels draining rather than motivating</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>You want to manage people more than own hard problems (we’re a flat, experienced team — everyone builds)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>You’re used to “good enough” shipping (small errors have outsized impact here)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Being in the room five days a week feels like a cost instead of a benefit</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>senior</Experiencelevel>
      <Workarrangement>On-site</Workarrangement>
      <Salaryrange>$230K – $280K • Offers Equity</Salaryrange>
      <Skills>React, Figma, Customer obsession, Attention to detail, Organization skills, Python, Django, PostHog, Sentry</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 compliance by ingesting and interpreting trade law, resolving conflicts across jurisdictions, and producing compliance determinations more reliable than human experts.</Employerdescription>
      <Employerwebsite>https://jobs.ashbyhq.com</Employerwebsite>
      <Compensationcurrency></Compensationcurrency>
      <Compensationmin></Compensationmin>
      <Compensationmax></Compensationmax>
      <Applyto>https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sphere/bfa759a9-f19a-4030-959e-9e29d81d6879</Applyto>
      <Location>San Francisco HQ</Location>
      <Country></Country>
      <Postedate>2026-03-08</Postedate>
    </job>
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