Mid - Senior Software Engineer (SDET)

Sphere Labs is building modern, compliance-native infrastructure for cross-border payments and settlement. The Mid - Senior Software Engineer (SDET) will own the release process, shape the CI/CD pipeline, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to create thorough test cases while improving platform testability.

Responsibilities:

• Own the release process — you're the last line of defense before code ships. That means uphold release criteria, coordinating across engineering, and making the call on whether something is ready to go
• Shape the CI/CD pipeline alongside engineering — defining what gates matter, what signals are trustworthy, and what tooling gives the team confidence at every stage from commit to deploy
• Work with product and engineering to translate user journeys and acceptance criteria into thorough, well-structured test cases — covering happy paths, edge cases, and failure modes across an expanding product surface area
• Execute those test cases continuously as the platform grows, catching regressions and surfacing bugs before they reach customers
• Collaborate with engineering to improve platform testability — better interfaces for test isolation, cleaner seams between components, and systems that make verification straightforward rather than painful
• Build and maintain automated test suites that scale with the product, reducing the manual burden over time and making quality a property of the delivery pipeline rather than a gate at the end of it
• Fundamentally raise the testing bar across the engineering team — through code review, documentation, pairing, and pragmatic guidance on what good testing looks like at each layer of the stack

Requirements:

• Solid programming fundamentals — you can write clean, maintainable test code and contribute to the codebase directly, not just file bug reports
• Hands-on experience owning or significantly contributing to a release process — you understand what it takes to ship software reliably and what breaks when that process is weak
• Experience designing or evolving CI/CD pipelines: what to gate on, what to automate, and how to keep builds fast and signal-to-noise high
• Experience writing automated tests across multiple layers: unit, integration, and end-to-end
• Strong analytical instincts for breaking down a user journey into the cases that actually matter — you think about what can go wrong, not just what's supposed to go right
• Excellent written communication — you can articulate a test plan, document a bug precisely, and explain a testing principle to an engineer who's never thought about it before
• Self-directed and systematic: comfortable working asynchronously across time zones, managing your own priorities, and pushing work forward without waiting for direction
• Familiarity with GitHub Actions or similar tooling is a plus
• Familiarity with TypeScript is a plus
• Familiarity with GCP or similar cloud platforms is a plus
• Experience testing API-driven or payments products is a plus; familiarity with KYC/KYB flows, webhooks, or financial compliance surface areas is a bonus