VP of Operations

Sphere Labs

The infrastructure moving the world's money today was built for another era: slow rails, walls between markets, and compliance layered in over time creating friction. Sphere Labs is building what comes next: modern, compliance-native infrastructure for cross-border payments and settlement, designed from the ground up to work for the businesses and regulated institutions it actually runs through. We work in active partnership with banks, licensed entities, and the regulators and jurisdictions shaping how global money moves, because the infrastructure that earns institutional trust has to be built alongside it.

Backed by Coinbase, Kraken, The Chernin Group, Jump Trading, Hudson River Trading, and some of the world's largest sovereign affiliates, we're a fully remote, global team building at the moment stablecoins are crossing into mainstream finance and regulated institutions are ready for modern rails. We hire self-starters: strong communicators and systematic thinkers who can look at a blank page and build something real. If you want a meaningful role in how global money movement evolves, and the upside that comes with getting in early, we'd like to meet you.

Job Description: VP of Operations
Company: Sphere Laboratories, Inc. ("Sphere Labs") | Division: Payments
Location: Remote - Global | Founded: 2022

Sphere is building a credibly neutral financial network for the emerging world: an API and platform that move regulated money across borders using stablecoins and local currency, built for the markets and currencies the legacy system serves the worst.

We've moved billions in payments volume, live across the US and Latin America with Asia and the Middle East next, run by a team in 15+ countries, and backed by leading sovereign affiliates, global commodities houses, trading firms (Jump, Hudson River Trading), exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken), GSIBs, and technologists (Anza, Temporal, Anagram, Solana Ventures). Businesses and the fintechs that serve them build on our API to move dollars, pesos, reais, and more.

Operations is the constraint on our next order of magnitude. We capture a fraction of the flow we move, and the prize is the operating system that turns that flow into durable revenue and launches new markets on repeat. The problems are hard on purpose: onboarding that is fast and bank-grade at once, compliance throughput for customers others turn away, resilient money movement across rails and jurisdictions, and corridor launches where no single playbook fits. 

This is the seat that builds it.

What you will be doing

As VP of Operations, you own the operating system behind Sphere's payments, banking, FX, and compliance flows globally. You turn live flow into a reliable, automated operation, make corridor launches repeatable on a playbook that compounds, and set the standards, controls, and runbooks that hold across markets while local teams execute.

First-year priority order: money movement and onboarding first, corridor launch right behind. The customer-facing operation is where the gap is widest and the activation upside is largest.

Responsibilities

Money Movement, Banking & Treasury (Core Focus)

• Operational execution across customers, vendors, banks, and internal systems: settlement, reconciliation, exception and failure handling.

• Bank and partner operations: funding, balances, connectivity, and enough rail redundancy that one outage does not take the network down.

• Operational treasury and funding, inside risk limits set by Finance.

• The metrics and dashboards that track reliability, speed, cost, and failure modes in real time, and the SOPs that let ops resolve most production issues without engineering.

Customer Operations

• Onboarding, implementation, support, and servicing, owned end to end. Onboarding compressed to days, the RFI loop automated, friction cut for customers and their users.

• Support and servicing on real SLAs with tiering, deflection, and escalation, plus the tracking behind completion, volume, adherence, health, and churn.

• The implementation and solutions-delivery motion that takes an integrator from signed to live. Pre-sale solutions engineering and account growth sit with GTM.

Corridor Launch & Run-State

• Operational launch and run-state of every market we enter. Each is its own rails, banks, regulator, and compliance regime, so define the standard that holds across jurisdictions and decide where local divergence is necessary.

• A launch playbook so the third corridor costs a fraction of the first.

• You set the standard and controls; local teams execute; you hold everyone to one bar. Corridor and customer strategy sits with GTM, compliance policy with the CCO.

Compliance Operations (Execution)

• KYC/KYB review, sanctions screening, on-chain compliance, transaction monitoring, and other essential components of an AML/CFT program: queue, throughput, SLAs, tooling.

• You own execution speed and quality and will work closely with our compliance and product teams to coordinate localized definitions of our risk management programs.
  
  

Automation, Risk & Team

• AI and automation that remove manual work and scale ops sublinearly with volume.

• Own operational risk across flows, reconciliation, and vendor and rail dependencies, with controls built alongside Compliance and Finance, who keep their functions. Hire and level the owners of each function, set the operating rhythms, and run it across distributed teams and time zones on one standard.

Ideal Background

Required

• 8+ years in fintech, payments, BaaS, banking infrastructure, PSPs, or money movement.

• Built operational systems 0-1 and scaled them 1-100 early-stage.

• Deep on payops, recon, incident management, onboarding, support, and controls.

• Built sub-functions and hired the people who run them.

• SOPs, tooling, and automation, with a workflow you can walk through.

• Sharp with operating metrics. High judgment, high ownership, steady in ambiguity.

Strong Plus

• Regulated, multi-rail, or multi-bank operations at scale.

• Stood up operations in a new country or corridor.

• Compliance or risk ops for higher-risk, higher-margin segments.

• Banks, payment providers, regulated partners, cross-border, multi-jurisdiction.

Who You Are

• Owns customer-money operations and keeps rigor under pressure.

• Player-coach: in the weeds on what is broken, hiring owners for what is solid.

• Orchestrates distributed teams across cultures and time zones, holding one bar without being in the room and being mindful of cultural nuances.

• Pushes throughput and tightens controls at once, and knows when each wins.

• Enforces standards and has the hard conversation.

Additional

• Up to ~10-15% travel for bank, partner, and corridor needs. 

• Extended hours during launches and incidents.

Benefits

• Own the operating system behind a global, multi-currency payments network. Real ownership, global scope with top-level counterparties and business opportunities.

• Competitive comp and equity, fully matched health, vision, and dental, laptop and travel stipends, biannual global offsites.

Not the right fit if

• You have only inherited mature systems and have not built from scratch.

• You prefer strategy-only roles over hands-on execution.

• You need clean ownership boundaries before you can operate.

• You are uncomfortable enforcing standards or holding teams accountable.

• Your experience is mostly from large banks without startup operating experience.

Why Sphere?

We sit at the intersection of crypto infrastructure and regulated finance — at the moment those worlds are finally converging. That means:

The window is now: For the first time in decades, the backbone of cross-border payments is being rebuilt. Legacy systems are fading, stablecoins are entering institutional finance, and the next settlement layer is being shaped right now. We're building it alongside the institutions that will run it, not around them.

High ownership, no playbook: This is early-stage work. You’ll be making decisions, building processes from scratch, and setting the direction instead of just following one. We’re looking for people who don’t wait for instructions, but jump in and figure things out.

Adaptability is the job: Strategy pivots here aren't failures, they're how we stay ahead of a fast-moving market and that’s our strength. 

Real traction, real stakes: SpherePay is live and trusted by 200+ businesses. SphereNet is in active development with banks and regulators across 18 jurisdictions and counting. There’s real demand, real momentum, and a huge opportunity to shape what comes next.