VP of Operations

About Sphere Labs

Sphere Labs is creating the next generation of cross-border payments and settlement infrastructure: a modern, compliance-first network designed for regulated businesses and institutions rather than legacy financial rails. The company works closely with banks, licensed partners, and the regulatory bodies and jurisdictions that shape how money moves globally.

Founded in 2022 and backed by Coinbase, Kraken, The Chernin Group, Jump Trading, Hudson River Trading, and major sovereign affiliates, Sphere Labs operates as a fully remote team spread across the world. The company is building at a moment when stablecoins are entering mainstream finance and regulated institutions are ready for modern infrastructure. The team values self-starters who communicate clearly, think systematically, and can turn an open problem into a working system.

Sphere has already processed billions in payment volume, is live in the US and Latin America, and is expanding into Asia and the Middle East. Businesses and fintechs use its API to move dollars, pesos, reais, and other currencies across borders.

Role Overview

As VP of Operations, you will own the operating engine behind Sphere’s global payments, banking, FX, and compliance workflows. Your focus will be on converting live transaction flow into a dependable, automated operation, making corridor launches repeatable, and establishing the standards, controls, and playbooks that can scale across markets.

The highest priorities in the first year are money movement and onboarding, followed closely by corridor launches. The customer-facing operation is currently the largest gap and the biggest source of activation upside.

What You Will Do

You will lead the operational system that supports Sphere’s global business, working across money movement, treasury, customer operations, market launches, compliance execution, automation, and team building.

• Run day-to-day operational execution across customers, vendors, banks, and internal systems, including settlement, reconciliation, and failure or exception handling.
• Oversee bank and partner operations such as funding, balances, connectivity, and redundancy planning so that a single outage does not disrupt the network.
• Manage operational treasury and funding within the risk boundaries defined by Finance.
• Build dashboards and metrics that monitor reliability, speed, cost, and failure patterns in real time, and create SOPs that allow most production issues to be solved without engineering involvement.
• Own customer onboarding, implementation, support, and servicing from end to end, with onboarding compressed to days and friction reduced through automation.
• Create support and servicing workflows with SLAs, tiering, escalation paths, deflection, and reporting on completion, volume, adherence, health, and churn.
• Lead the implementation and solutions-delivery motion that takes an integrated customer from signed contract to live deployment.
• Own the operational launch and steady-state management for each new market or corridor, adapting standards where local requirements demand it while keeping one global bar.
• Build a launch playbook that makes each new corridor faster and more efficient than the last.
• Run the execution side of compliance operations, including KYC/KYB review, sanctions screening, on-chain checks, transaction monitoring, and core AML/CFT queue management.
• Partner with compliance and product teams to align localized risk-management execution.
• Use AI and automation to eliminate manual work and scale operations more efficiently than headcount growth.
• Own operational risk across money flows, reconciliation, and vendor/rail dependencies in partnership with Compliance and Finance.
• Hire, organize, and level the owners of each sub-function, establish operating rhythms, and manage distributed teams across time zones.

Ideal Background

The company is looking for a senior operator with experience building and scaling high-stakes financial operations from the ground up.

• 8+ years of experience in fintech, payments, banking-as-a-service, banking infrastructure, PSPs, or money movement.
• Experience building operational systems from zero to one and scaling them in an early-stage environment.
• Strong background in payops, reconciliation, incident management, onboarding, support, and control frameworks.
• Proven ability to create sub-functions and recruit the leaders who run them.
• Hands-on experience with SOPs, tooling, and automation, with the ability to explain your workflow clearly.
• Strong command of operating metrics, high judgment, strong ownership, and comfort working through ambiguity.

Preferred Experience

• Scaled operations in regulated, multi-rail, or multi-bank environments.
• Launched operations in a new country or payment corridor.
• Handled compliance or risk operations in higher-risk, higher-margin segments.
• Worked with banks, payment providers, regulated partners, or cross-border, multi-jurisdiction systems.

Working Style

• You take responsibility for customer-money operations and maintain rigor even under pressure.
• You act as a player-coach: hands-on where problems exist, while hiring owners for stable functions.
• You can coordinate distributed teams across cultures and time zones while keeping one operating standard.
• You balance throughput and controls, knowing when to push speed and when to tighten governance.
• You are comfortable setting standards and addressing accountability directly.

Additional Details

• Travel may be required up to 10–15% for bank, partner, and corridor needs.
• Extended working hours may be necessary during launches and incidents.

Compensation and Benefits

The role includes competitive compensation and equity. Additional benefits include fully covered health, vision, and dental coverage, laptop and travel stipends, and biannual global offsites.

Who May Not Be a Fit

• Candidates who have only worked with mature systems and have not built processes from scratch.
• People who prefer strategy-only roles and do not want to stay close to execution.
• Those who need clearly separated ownership boundaries before they can operate effectively.
• Candidates who are uncomfortable enforcing standards or holding teams accountable.
• Professionals whose background is primarily in large banks without startup operating experience.

Why This Role Matters

This position sits at the intersection of crypto infrastructure and regulated finance at a time when both are converging. Sphere Labs is helping rebuild the backbone of cross-border payments, working alongside the institutions that will operate the next settlement layer.

The company offers significant ownership, the chance to build processes from scratch, and the opportunity to shape direction in a fast-moving market. SpherePay is live and trusted by 200+ businesses, while SphereNet is being developed with banks and regulators across 18 jurisdictions and counting.

Hiring Process Note

Sphere Labs may use AI tools to assist with parts of recruitment, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or checking responses for inconsistencies or verification signals. These tools support the recruiting team but do not replace human judgment, and final hiring decisions are made by people.