Founding Product Engineer

Sphere

$120K — $160K *
Consumer Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in product engineering, specifically with React and Figma.
  • Proven ability to engage in direct customer interactions, ideally with finance and tax professionals.
  • Exceptional attention to detail, ensuring high accuracy in data-driven projects.
  • Strong organizational skills to prioritize feature requests in a fast-paced environment.
  • A self-starter attitude with a focus on accountability and meeting measurable targets.

Responsibilities

  • Gather and prioritize customer feedback to inform product features and improvements.
  • Collaborate closely with design teams to implement customer-focused features.
  • Execute feature development rapidly, delivering completed work on a daily basis.
  • Provide customer support to gain insights into their needs and behaviors.
  • Drive ownership of the product roadmap alongside the CEO/Founder, refining priorities based on new insights.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to impact the direction of a game-changing tech company in a rapidly growing sector.
  • Work closely with top leadership, including the CEO/Founder, allowing for significant professional growth.
  • Engagement with a diverse range of customers across the finance and tax sector, building valuable client relationships.
  • Contribute to the creation of an AI-native product, positioning the company at the forefront of technology in tax compliance.
Full Job Description
THE ROLE

CX has an unusually high important in a product like Sphere. Trust is of utmost importance when handling a company'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?).

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.

They'll be working directly with customers, our design and eng team as well as our CEO / Founder to bring Sphere's product vision of making the world one market to life.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Within weeks:
  • 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
  • Collaborate extensively with design on bringing those features to life
  • Executing and shipping features, end-to-end, on a daily basis
  • Doing customer support where necessary to understand our customers and how they think as much as possible


Within months:
  • Own Sphere's CX and make it unique
  • Own feature / product roadmap in conjunction with the CEO / Founder (you will work a lot together)
  • Build / implement more rigorous customer feedback / analysis processes to allow us to better prioritize roadmap


REQUIREMENTS
  • Strong experience with React. Our entire front end is built in react.
  • Strong experience with Figma. In order to collaborate efficiently with design.
  • 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.
  • Strong organization skills. We get hundreds of feature requests every day. How you monitor, organize and prioritize these is key.


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 using tools like PostHog and Sentry


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.
  • 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.


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)
  • Being in the room five days a week feels like a cost instead of a benefit

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