Product Engineer

Sphinx • Full-time • San Francisco, CA, US • 1w ago

tl;dr: We're automating compliance for banks and fintechs with AI agents that work like human analysts – on a browser. While our core engineering team scales what works, we need someone to figure out what's next. If you love building prototypes that become products, pushing the boundaries of what AI agents can do, and shipping experiments that change the roadmap, we should talk.

Background

Before you can move money or open an account, someone has to make sure you're not a criminal. That's compliance, and it's broken.

Sphinx builds AI analysts that work inside browsers, APIs, and internal systems just like humans – automating AML, KYC, KYB, and transaction monitoring end-to-end.

Our agents already handle millions of compliance decisions across banking, fintech, and crypto. But what they can do today is a fraction of what's possible. We need someone whose entire job is to explore that gap – building new agent capabilities, prototyping new product surfaces, and turning "what if" into "ship it."

Why Join Sphinx

You'll build the features that define the product: Every product has a backlog of "we should build that." Your job is to pick the best ones, prototype them, and turn them into features customers love. The ideas are everywhere – from customer conversations, from the team, from you.
We have never lost a deal to a competitor: Yes you heard that right, we've won every RFP we've been in. The product works – your job is to make it do things nobody's seen before.
Your prototypes become products: This isn't a research lab where things die in a notebook. When your experiments work, they ship to real banks handling real money. The feedback loop is weeks, not years.
Hard tech: We're going from zero to one; our tech is our moat.
Small team, big surface area: Our co-founders previously sold an AI company & have built ML systems that scaled to millions of users and closed deals with major banks. The rest of our team in SF includes PhDs, industry experts, and competitive coders.
Zero startup bullshit: We're not chasing investors, we're chasing customers. We're trusted by leading banks and fintechs across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and LatAm. They've seen 90% less manual work, 4× lower costs.

What You'll Work On

Build new product features from scratch. We have a long list of ideas that could become core products – from customer requests, from the team, and from watching how compliance actually works. You'll pick the highest-leverage ones, prototype them fast, and turn them into features that expand what Sphinx can do.

Own the full stack. You'll design, build, and ship end-to-end: frontend interfaces, backend systems, AI integrations, and everything in between. You're not handing off a spec -- you're handing off a working product.

Move between product and engineering fluidly. You'll talk to customers to understand their pain, prototype solutions, test with real users, and iterate until it's right. You think like a PM and build like an engineer.

Feed the roadmap. Your experiments will shape what Sphinx builds next. You'll work closely with the CEO and core engineering team to decide which bets to double down on and which to shelve.

What We Look For

You're deeply technical: You have strong fundamentals in software engineering and a working knowledge of ML/AI systems. You're comfortable building end-to-end (backend, frontend, model integration, infra) whatever the experiment requires.
You build fast and learn faster: You can go from idea to working prototype in days, not weeks. You're comfortable throwing things away when they don't work and doubling down when they do.
You have product instincts: You don't just build what's technically interesting – you build what's useful. You think about the user, the workflow, and the problem before writing a line of code.
You're creative and opinionated: You have strong ideas about what AI agents should be able to do and how people should interact with them. You bring new ideas to the table, not just execute on existing ones.
You ship and iterate: You'd rather put something imperfect in front of users than spend weeks perfecting it in isolation. You learn from real feedback, not assumptions.
You communicate with clarity: We move fast with minimal process. You need to articulate what you're building, why it matters, and what you've learned – to engineers, to the CEO, and to customers.
You're energized by impact: Our customers protect the financial system from criminals. Your experiments will become the tools that make that possible at scale.

About The Interview