Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Sphere; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Sphere in San Francisco is seeking a Founding Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with our most strategic customers, translating cross‑border regulatory requirements into production‑grade software and shaping our forward‑deployed motion as we scale.

You will own problems end‑to‑end—from discovery to deployment—working directly with the Founder, Engineering, and GTM teams to ensure Sphere fits seamlessly into customer operations and delivers robust tax/compliance capabilities.

Qualifications

• Experience in an FDE or customer-facing engineering role.
• Experience shipping bespoke customer features end-to-end.
• Ownership from discovery to shipped without being told how.
• Strong communication at a fast pace with clear outcomes.
• Customer obsession and attention to detail in finance contexts.

Responsibilities

• Onboard customers pre-contract and activate Sphere accounts.
• Navigate customer billing system integrations.
• Pull liability reports and interpret exposure for clients.
• Guide clients through global tax liability and VAT ID collection.
• Bridge customer needs with engineering roadmap and write tight PRDs/proposals.
• Build custom features and integrations for key accounts.

Skills

FDE experience

Customer-facing engineering

Ownership

Curiosity

Strong communication

Customer obsession

Attention to detail

Tools

Python

Django

React

Job description

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.

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, five days in office.

The problem keeps compounding. Expanding into input tax, withholding, e‑invoicing, tariffs — each multiplies the complexity. Tens of millions of transactions today, billions ahead.

THE ROLE

As the Founding 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.

You won't just be executing a playbook, you'll be defining it as you go. Working directly with our Founder, Engineering team, and GTM teams, you'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.

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'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.

What You'll Do

Enablement

• Onboard customers pre‑contract, get accounts functional in Sphere
• Navigate customer billing system integrations
• Pull and interpret liability reports, help customers understand exposure
• Guide clients through the complexity of understanding and managing their global tax liability
• Guide customers through VAT ID collection, address hygiene, and regional compliance

Monetization

• Bridge between customer needs and the engineering roadmap
• Be entrenched with the customer by ensuring Sphere is integral to all of the company’s revenue compliance needs
• Research new compliance requirements (e‑invoicing, input tax, etc.) end to end
• Identify patterns across customers - what custom work is being requested repeatedly
• Scope and write tight technical PRDs/proposals ready to hand to core engineering
• Build custom features and integrations on top of the Sphere platform for key accounts
• Identify custom builds that could be scaled and deployed across all customers as new features or products

Requirements

• 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.
• Very strong attention to detail. When you work with numbers, this is a non‑negotiable - it’s not enough to be 99% right.

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 with React. Our entire front end is built in React.

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.

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).