VP of Operations

Sphere Laboratories, Inc.

2d • Remote

About The Position

Sphere Labs is building the next generation of infrastructure for cross-border payments and settlement, designed from the ground up to be compliance-native and serve businesses and regulated institutions. The company is a fully remote, global team backed by major investors and partners, operating at the convergence of crypto infrastructure and regulated finance. Sphere Labs has moved billions in payments volume and is expanding globally. The VP of Operations will be instrumental in scaling the company's operations to support its next phase of growth, focusing on building a robust operating system for payments, banking, FX, and compliance flows.

Requirements

• 8+ years in fintech, payments, BaaS, banking infrastructure, PSPs, or money movement.
• Experience building operational systems from scratch (0-1) and scaling them (1-100) in early-stage environments.
• Deep understanding of payops, reconciliation, incident management, onboarding, support, and controls.
• Experience building sub-functions and hiring the people to run them.
• Proficiency in developing SOPs, tooling, and automation.
• Strong understanding of operating metrics.
• High judgment, high ownership, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Experience with regulated, multi-rail, or multi-bank operations at scale.
• Experience standing up operations in a new country or corridor.
• Experience with compliance or risk ops for higher-risk, higher-margin segments.
• Experience with banks, payment providers, regulated partners, cross-border, and multi-jurisdiction environments.
• Ability to own customer-money operations and maintain rigor under pressure.
• Player-coach mentality: willing to be hands-on with broken systems while hiring owners for solid ones.
• Ability to orchestrate distributed teams across cultures and time zones, maintaining a consistent standard while being mindful of cultural nuances.
• Ability to push throughput and tighten controls simultaneously, knowing when each is appropriate.
• Willingness to enforce standards and have difficult conversations.
• Startup operating experience.

Nice To Haves

• 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.
• Experience with banks, payment providers, regulated partners, cross-border, multi-jurisdiction.

Responsibilities

• Own the operating system behind Sphere's payments, banking, FX, and compliance flows globally.
• Turn live flow into a reliable, automated operation.
• Make corridor launches repeatable on a playbook that compounds.
• Set the standards, controls, and runbooks that hold across markets while local teams execute.
• Prioritize money movement and onboarding, followed closely by corridor launch.
• Ensure operational execution across customers, vendors, banks, and internal systems, including settlement, reconciliation, and exception/failure handling.
• Manage bank and partner operations, focusing on funding, balances, connectivity, and rail redundancy.
• Oversee operational treasury and funding within defined risk limits.
• Develop and maintain metrics and dashboards for reliability, speed, cost, and failure modes, and create SOPs for issue resolution.
• Own customer onboarding, implementation, support, and servicing end-to-end, aiming for compressed onboarding times and automated processes.
• Establish support and servicing SLAs with tiering, deflection, and escalation mechanisms.
• Manage the implementation and solutions-delivery process from signing to live.
• Oversee operational launch and run-state for new markets, defining standards that hold across jurisdictions and managing local divergence.
• Develop a launch playbook to reduce the cost and complexity of subsequent corridor launches.
• Ensure execution speed and quality for KYC/KYB review, sanctions screening, on-chain compliance, and transaction monitoring.
• Implement AI and automation to scale operations sublinearly with volume.
• Manage operational risk across flows, reconciliation, and dependencies on vendors and rails.
• Hire and develop functional owners, establish operating rhythms, and manage distributed teams across time zones.
• Travel up to 10-15% for bank, partner, and corridor needs.
• Work extended hours during launches and incidents.

Benefits

• Own the operating system behind a global, multi-currency payments network.
• Real ownership and global scope with top-level counterparties and business opportunities.
• Competitive compensation and equity.
• Fully matched health, vision, and dental insurance.
• Laptop and travel stipends.
• Biannual global offsites.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed