--- title: 'Member of Technical Staff (Payments) at Sapiom' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-payments-sapiom-san-francisco-95h8gasvfywc' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-05' --- # Member of Technical Staff (Payments) at Sapiom - **Company:** Sapiom - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-10-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sapiom/08ccca7b-a99e-49a8-a4b4-be94359972c5 ## Job description ## About Sapiom Sapiom is building payment infrastructure for AI agents. We enable agents to make purchases for people, manage payments between businesses, and buy the compute, inference, and APIs they need to operate. Through one integration, Sapiom connects agents to funding sources and payment methods. Our intent verification checks that each transaction matches what the person or business authorized. Spending controls define where and how much agents can spend, with a record of every transaction and its outcome. We're building toward a world where people and businesses can delegate payments to agents with confidence. We're a small team in San Francisco with deep experience in payments and infrastructure. Our founder was Director of Engineering in Payments at Shopify for five years. We've raised $50 million in our first 12 months from Accel, Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic. ## About the role Agents are starting to buy things on their own, and the rails underneath all assume a person at the keyboard. Letting an agent complete a purchase inside limits its owner actually set, and keeping proof of what was agreed, is the company. The first version of that ships before you'd start. Almost everything that turns it into something customers can depend on is still ahead, and the team works those problems in parallel rather than one at a time. You'd own one of them. Payments is unforgiving in a way most product work isn't. A purchase either moves money or it doesn't. A record either holds up six months later when someone disputes a charge, or it's worthless. We'd like someone who finds that interesting. This is a staff role. You'd set the design for a large piece of this, at thirty people, while it's still deciding-shaped. ## What you'd work on Limits and authority. How much latitude an owner hands an agent, and how that gets enforced before money moves rather than explained afterwards. Most of these decisions are still open. Completing the purchase. Checkout is where this gets unglamorous. Every merchant behaves differently, totals move, and plenty of steps still expect a human. Making that reliable across a long tail of them is a multi-quarter problem. What happens when it goes wrong. A payment that goes quiet is the hardest case in the domain. The system has to work out what actually happened before it does anything else, and never charge someone twice. Proof. A versioned record of what a buyer saw and agreed to, still legible months later when someone disputes it. Unglamorous, and the thing the rest of it rests on. The surface customers build on. A public API and the tools an agent calls. Designing a contract a model uses correctly is its own discipline. You may be a fit if - You have 8+ years building production software, several of them in payments, money movement, or financial infrastructure. We're hiring for depth in the domain. - You've owned architecture from first principles — set the design, defended it, and lived with what it cost. - You've worked somewhere being wrong was expensive, and you design for failure up front: idempotency, retries, reconciliation against a number someone else is also computing. - You have real range across the stack. Strong TypeScript, and you build the interface on top of your own system instead of handing that off. - You've run a multi-month project from a problem statement rather than a spec, and other engineers built on what you shipped. - You use AI tools in your own engineering workflow. Nice to have: card issuing, tokenization, or PCI scope; checkout integrations at depth; browser automation or request interception; something you shipped that an LLM calls as a tool; early-stage companies where you set the architecture rather than inherited it. Applying A recruiter screen, then a loop of roughly three hours: a hands-on AI project, a project deep dive, and a conversation with our founder. Everyone on our engineering team carries the title Member of Technical Staff internally. ## About Sapiom ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Sapiom builds the financial access layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and use software, APIs, data, and compute through a single key, eliminating vendor accounts and billing relationships. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: 2025 - **Founders**: Ilan Zerbib ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: AI infrastructure, Payments, API orchestration - **Target customers**: B2B – AI agent developers, vibe-coding platforms (e.g., Lovable, Bolt), and any company building autonomous agents that need to transact with external services. - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Build the access layer for the agentic economy" – create infrastructure that lets AI agents transact safely with the real economy. ## Products & Services - **Access Network**: The core execution engine. One API key replaces every vendor account, credential, and billing relationship. Services are metered per use (no subscriptions or minimums). Capabilities include: - **User Authentication**: Agents verify users via SMS, OTP, transactional messaging – billed per verification. - **LLM Inference**: Access 400+ language models from leading providers with automatic provider selection – billed per token. - **AI Search**: Live web and structured data queries with real-time results and source citations – billed per query. - **Voice and Audio**: Generate speech, transcribe audio, create sound effects – billed per minute. - **Image Generation**: Create images from text prompts – billed per generation. - **Video**: Generate, transform, and subtitle video content – billed per generation. - **Web Extraction**: Browse, scrape, and interact with websites – billed per session. - **Compute**: Run code in serverless containers – billed per execution. - **Messaging**: Publish messages, manage queues, schedule tasks – billed per message. - **Databases**: Provision Redis, vector, search, Postgres databases – billed per operation. - **Filesystem**: Store, organize, and serve files autonomously – billed per operation. - **Integration Options**: MCP (zero-code), Skills (one command), SDK (full control). ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric (Private)**: Total funding raised – $15.75 million (Seed round, led by Accel, closed February 2026) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Accel (lead), Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Coinbase Ventures. Founder Ilan Zerbib previously Director of Engineering for Payments at Shopify. - **Growth Signals**: Team of ~8 employees (as of mid-2026) with 20+ open roles posted; strong backing from top-tier funds; early adoption by vibe-coding platforms; monthly headcount growth of +11.1% per LinkedIn. ## Competitive Advantages - **Zero-friction access**: A single API key replaces dozens of vendor accounts, credentials, and billing relationships – agents get immediate access to any paid service without manual setup. - **Metered, transparent pricing**: No subscriptions, no minimums – pay only for what agents actually execute. This aligns cost with usage and reduces overhead. - **Deep payments & infrastructure DNA**: Founder built Shopify’s payments infrastructure; team hails from Modern Treasury, Google, Shopify, and other high-scale fintech/infra companies. - **Protocol rather than catalog**: The Access Network allows agents to use any paid API on the internet without needing a pre-curated catalog – extensible by design. - **Backed by Anthropic**: Strategic investment from a leading AI lab ensures alignment with frontier agent capabilities. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Scaling the Access Network to more B2B AI agent builders and vibe-coding platforms; hiring aggressively (20+ open roles) to expand engineering, product, marketing, and developer relations; building identity, policy, settlement, and risk layers for machine commerce. - **Direction for growth**: Become the default economic substrate for autonomous agents – moving from B2B to eventually enabling consumer AI agents to transact independently. ## Why Work Here - **Culture highlights**: Small, high-trust team; senior hires given context not orders; strong opinions weakly held; decisions made in writing; "high-intensity ownership" with meaningful founder-level equity. - **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: On-site in San Francisco, CA. Regular team offsites for deep work and relationship building. - **Notable perks**: - Top-tier health coverage (medical, dental, vision – fully covered for employees and dependents) - Learning budget (books, conferences, courses) - Best-in-class hardware (no budget approval delays) - Flexible time off (no vacation tracking; "own your recovery fully and effectively") - Mission-critical work at extreme velocity ## Sources 1. [sapiom.ai](https://www.sapiom.ai/) 2. [sapiom.ai/careers](https://www.sapiom.ai/careers) 3. [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/05/sapiom-raises-15m-to-help-ai-agents-buy-their-own-tech-tools/) 4. [CB Insights](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/sapiom) 5. [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sapiom) ## Other roles at Sapiom - [Workplace Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/workplace-manager-sapiom-san-francisco-j0106jps3e5z) — San Francisco, CA - [Growth Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-marketing-sapiom-san-francisco-ysdkhs8jxea0) — San Francisco, CA - [Developer Relations](https://feeny.ai/job/developer-relations-sapiom-san-francisco-hxgjjx1vk901) — San Francisco, CA