Founding Customer Success Manager at Sphere, an AI-native trade compliance platform. Build CS processes, playbooks, and team from scratch while managing the full customer lifecycle and protecting engineering bandwidth.
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.
🌍 Massive TAM: Every business around the world needs this. Compliance isn’t optional.
🌬️ Strong macro tailwinds: Businesses are expanding globally at a faster pace, while tax authorities are cracking down on cross-border compliance, driving urgent demand.
✨ AI advantage: Incumbents can’t scale beyond the U.S.; our AI-native tax engine can.
🔮 Multi product play: Indirect tax is just the start; we’re building a compound startup that helps business with all forms of revenue-based compliance.
You'll be the first CS hire at Sphere, which means you're not stepping into a function; you're building one. The role spans the full customer lifecycle, from resolving technical issues to expanding contracts, but the bigger mandate is creating the systems, processes, and playbooks that a future team will run on. You'll get deep on cross-border compliance, protect engineering bandwidth, and operate with a high degree of autonomy. You'll succeed in this role if you thrive on ownership and blank slates, are customer-obsessed, and get things done.
Full-stack CS: Triaging customer issues, helping maintain our industry-leading Time To Resolution metrics, expanding our customer contracts, assisting with technical implementation.
Enhance our CS ops stack: We manage customer support in Slack and use Pylon as our infrastructure. We'll expect you to build on and improve that
Build out CS processes/playbook: You have the chance to define our CS processes and build a team underneath you
Ramp on compliance expertise: You're helping customers deal with cross-border compliance - it's a technical subject that requires expertise.
Your first 90 days will revolve around stabilizing inbound, protecting engineering time, and implementing repeatable systems that scale.
You’ll operate independently at first, building the foundation and workflows that others will eventually scale with you.
Proven experience building out CS processes, teams, and playbooks
Early-stage startup experience (building processes from scratch).
Comfortable navigating admin tools, reading API documentation, and handling basic data validation to resolve issues quickly.
Experience working with finance/accounting functions
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)