Sphere is building a modern-day SWIFT for fintechs, for the 21st century and beyond. Specifically, we are creating a closed-loop, shared account ledger that leverages frontier technology in blockchains, cryptography (zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, MPC-TSS etc.), in order to create a permissioned, privacy-preserving, and natively compliant sourcing, matching, and verification environment for fintechs around the world to be able to settle value transfer in seconds. Our mission is to revolutionize global money movement through self-evolving and internet-native financial rails to compose with traditional banking, payments, and FX infrastructure.

We’re a seed+ startup globally distributed across the US, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, Portugal, and the Caribbean. We’ve raised $7m from some of the best high-frequency trading and venture firms in the world, including TCG, Jump, Hudson River Trading, and Coinbase; as well as angels from companies like Stripe, PayPal, Brex, Visa, Revolut, Grab, Solana, Circle, and JPMorgan Chase. Our team has previously built financial infrastructure at some of the world’s leading companies (Coinbase, Vanguard, Franklin Templeton, Chainalysis, Wells Fargo) as well as at startups and accelerators like YCombinator. Today, Sphere processes 7-8 figures in daily payments volume.

We’re spending the best years of our lives building Sphere, driven by a shared belief that cutting-edge and credibly neutral technology as the basis for regulated money movement can substantially increase the total amount of human prosperity in the world.

Key Responsibilities

  • Work closely with other senior engineers in leading out a nimble but world-class team of 3-4 engineers to shape, build, and maintain Spherenet: a permissioned, privacy-preserving, and natively compliant (Layer-1) blockchain to be a global shared account ledger for fintechs.
  • Help drive the design, development, and maintenance of various high-performance distributed systems that leverage cryptographic tools to compliantly preserve privacy (zero-knowledge proofs [extractable zkSNARKs], fully homomorphic encryption (BFV/BGV, CCGI), multi-party computation, threshold signature schemes, Shamir secret sharing, hardware acceleration (ASIC/FPGA), trusted execution environments, hierarchical determinism, DKG, etc.).
  • Directly contribute to core interface design and write code. Rationally scrutinize and clearly consider the technology and architecture choices we make in building products that our customers want. In many cases, you will be the key decision maker.
  • Help drive the design, development, and maintenance (whether new or existing) of our low-latency microservices, databases, developer tooling, and distributed systems core. Ensure that these systems are reliable, available, efficient, and scalable.

Requirements

  • >=5 years of software engineering at startups, ideally has experienced both early stage (pre-seed to Series A) and later stage (Series B+) as a founder or early team member .
  • Great communication skills, comfortable with leading reviews, documentation, and technical discussions on testing and benchmarking.
  • Deep understanding and passion for low-level languages like C/C++/Rust. You have a love/hate relationship with the Rust compiler and/or libraries such as tokio or C++ STL, such that you’ve put in the hours to learn unsafe mode or have tried to re-implement optimized structs yourself.
  • Experience designing, developing, and deploying scalable low-latency microservices. You know your way around handling high-throughput data streams, and have managed event-driven infrastructure systems with tools like Kafka, Spark, Flink, RabbitMQ, and SQS.
  • You’ve built enough bad databases to learn how SQL internals like indexing, execution plans, and concurrency control actually work; and therefore understand their trade-offs.
  • Experience deploying and maintaining distributed cloud infrastructure (we use GCP). You’re comfortable with everything from handling K8 throttling to writing clean Helm templates.
  • You care about your code. It matters to you that it’s simple, readable, and performant. You take pleasure in making it more organized over time. However, you are comfortable navigating business trade-offs —code will never be perfect at launch, but we can make it great over time.
  • Through the circumstances of your life, you care deeply about increasing economic opportunity in emerging markets by making global commerce accessible to everyone.
  • Experience with applied cryptography or hardware acceleration are hard pluses.

Why Join Us?

  • After years navigating the idea maze, we’ve stumbled on a previously unexplored path to exponentially boost human prosperity and make the world a fairer place. Join us in making a global impact, particularly in emerging regions that are just starting to connect.
  • Have executive level impact, responsibility, and upside in an early-stage startup that has found initial product-market fit and has been growing more than 100% per month over the last year.
  • Work on some of the hardest problems in the world, leveraging frontier technology in cryptography and distributed systems to modernize payments infrastructure from 1959.
  • Join as employee #13-14 (and engineer #6-7) and help us define a world-class culture of collaboration, rationality, low ego/status, customer obsession, and output.
  • Whether you’re a systems generalist or applied cryptography specialist, you’ll be a key technical team member in helping us build end-to-end a modern SWIFT for the 21st century and beyond. There are rare learning opportunities, and you’ll be joining as we start to scale.
  • Work wherever you want, whenever you want, as long as you ship.