Manage VAT, GST, and sales tax worldwide with Sphere’s global tax compliance software. Automate registration, calculation, and filing seamlessly. Backed by Y Combinator, a16z and Felicis.
About the role
As a 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.
What they're looking for
- 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
More about this role
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.
Sphere built the system that solves it. Our AI (TRAM) ingests global trade law, interprets it, resolves conflicts across jurisdictions, and produces compliance determinations more reliable than human experts. We handle the entire lifecycle — calculation, registration, filing, remittance — at millisecond latency with zero downtime.
Backed by a16z and YC. $21M Series A, 30%+ month-over-month growth, customers include ElevenLabs, Replit, Deel, Runway, and Lovable.
Small team, global surface area . Everyone owns a domain that would be a full team at a larger company. San Francisco, in office.
The problem keeps compounding . Expanding into input tax, withholding, e-invoicing, tariffs — each multiplies the complexity. Tens of millions of transactions today,...
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