Staff Backend Engineer in London

Sparta is the next-generation commodity trading platform. We give trading desks the clarity, control, and collaboration they need to move faster and trade smarter. In February 2025, we secured $42 million in Series B funding. Now we’re scaling up across the business, and it’s an exciting time to join.

Our people are the driving force behind everything we do. At Sparta, you’ll be trusted to take ownership, backed by a team who wants you to succeed. You’ll be challenged, supported, and given room to grow. Because building something this ambitious takes everyone at their best.

At Sparta, your work has reach. From improving our platform, to powering smarter decisions for our customers, to changing how commodity trading is done around the world. And because we’re growing fast, you won’t just build your career. You’ll accelerate it, with a level of ownership and impact you simply don’t get at bigger, more bureaucratic companies.

At Sparta, we’re on a mission to build the next generation of commodity trading platforms - replacing the fragmented tools that traders typically rely on with a single, powerful dashboard. Our product is a data-driven platform that aggregates real-time feeds from across the commodities domain, transforming them into intuitive, actionable visualisations within one unified interface. Users can explore pre-built data views or define their own custom formulas to create tailored insights.

To deliver on this vision, our engineers tackle significant distributed systems challenges on a daily basis, where designing for reliability and performance at scale is essential to ensuring a seamless user experience. As we unlock the next level of scale, these challenges become even more critical. We’re looking to bring on senior engineers with experience building data-intensive applications at scale to help drive this next phase of growth.

We’re also looking for people who thrive in an empowered environment - individuals who are comfortable being given problems to solve rather than solutions to implement. You should enjoy working at pace, value autonomy, and prefer to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. As a senior member of the team, you’ll be comfortable contributing to the product direction, engaging with stakeholders, and playing a key role in mentoring and developing our more junior engineers.

Whereas Sparta is a remote-first company, for this role we’re looking for someone who values a hybrid working style, which in a typical week could involve spending a couple of days in the office - with flexibility built in.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Help lead the design, build, and maintenance of distributed backend systems powering both real-time and analytical data processing.
• Optimise data pipelines and services for low latency, high throughput, and scalability.
• Collaborate closely with the broader engineering team and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure alignment on technical direction and product goals.
• Drive architectural decisions that strengthen system reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Contribute to the definition and realisation of our target architecture, helping guide the evolution of the platform.
• Mentor and support other engineers through design reviews, technical discussions, and knowledge sharing.

About You:

• 7+ years of experience as a software engineer, with a strong track record of delivering production-quality systems.
• 2+ years working within a product-focused organisation, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams.
• Proven experience building data-intensive applications at scale and deploying them to production environments.
• Ability to effectively reason about system trade-offs, including throughput, latency, consistency, and cost.
• Comfortable working with multiple programming languages such as Kotlin, Java, Python, and TypeScript.
• Equally comfortable designing holistic, high-level architecture as well as diving deep into low-level implementation details.
• Experienced in building, analysing, and interpreting system observability (metrics, logging, tracing).
• Experienced in designing, building, and deploying services in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP.
• Experienced in working with core infrastructure technologies tooling such as Kafka, Flink, Redis and/or clustered Postgres.

Nice to have experience:

• Experience working within or closely with DevOps, SRE and or infrastructure teams.
• Experience leading teams or managing engineers, driving both delivery and technical excellence.
• Exposure to complex distributed environments with demanding constraints such as high throughput, low latency, or large-scale datasets.

Why Join Sparta?

At Sparta, our culture is built on innovation, collaboration, and high performance. We thrive in a fast-paced environment where initiative is celebrated, challenges are embraced, and impact is rewarded.

• Equity in a high-growth, VC-backed company.
• $42M in Series B funding—strong market traction and investment.
• Early-stage growth—build your career as we scale.
• Market-leading product—we are redefining energy trading intelligence.
• Top-tier tools and technology to support your success.

What’s the culture like at Sparta?

At Sparta, our culture is not just a set of values written on a wall—it's a way of life. We embrace a dynamic environment where initiative is celebrated, challenges are met head-on, and innovation thrives.

You will collaborate with like-minded individuals who are passionate about our mission and deeply committed to crafting outstanding products and achieving success for our customers.

Our values:

• Ask for forgiveness, not permission: We are building a category-defining company, and that requires speed, boldness, and ownership. If you see something that needs doing, do it. Don’t wait. Own it. If it goes wrong, learn fast and fix it. Celebrate initiative. Mistakes are feedback, not failure.
• Discomfort is where growth happens: Growth doesn’t come from playing it safe. It comes from stretching beyond what you already know. Embrace change, seek new challenges, push your boundaries. We reward those who are brave enough to try, fail, and learn.
• Stay hungry, ditch the ego: Spartans are ambitious - but for the mission, not for the politics. Leave your ego at the door. Titles don’t matter. Results do. Focus on what drives real outcomes, not what makes you look good. Ambition fuels progress, and humility keeps us grounded.
• Fall in love with the problem: We exist to solve real customer problems - not to push our ideas. Always start with their needs, not our assumptions. Everything else is noise.
• Challenge openly, support fully: We grow through truth, not silence. Feedback is a gift - but only when it’s shared with courage and care. Radical candour builds trust. We embrace diverse debate, but once a decision is made, we align and wholeheartedly commit.

Sparta Commodities is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and promotes diversity within its workforce. We are determined that no-one will ever receive less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, race, veteran status or any basis covered by appropriate law.