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Senior Backend EngineerSparta · London
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Sparta

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Senior Backend Engineer

🗓️ Posted 2026-10-05 London Fulltime Hybrid ICT
💰 Salary Not shared 📊 Market 7,000 CHF–10,000 CHF/mo

About the Company

We Are Sparta Sparta is the AI leader for commodity trading, home to Leonidas AI, the first operating system for oil and commodity traders. Backed by 42 million in Series B funding led by One Peak, with participation from returning investors FirstMark and Singular, the same investors behind AI leaders like Legora, Dataiku, and Synthesia. Most companies are building a chatbot on top of data. We've built an agent with an actual reasoning layer, grounded in years of proprietary market data and in-house trading expertise nobody else has. We're scaling fast, and it's an exciting time to join. From independents to multinationals, the world's leading commodity teams use Sparta and Leonidas AI to move faster, trade smarter, and stay ahead of the market. At Sparta, you'll be trusted to take ownership, backed by a team who wants you to succeed. AI is how we build here, not just what we sell. Good ideas move fast, and yours could go from staging to production in a couple of hours, whatever department you're in. You'll be challenged, supported, and given room to grow, building the AI that's changing how commodity trading gets done. Your work has reach. From shaping Leonidas AI, to powering smarter decisions for traders around the world, to changing how commodity trading is done. And because we're growing fast, you'll accelerate your career with a level of ownership and impact you simply won't get at bigger, slower-moving companies. At Sparta, we're on a mission to build the next g

Responsibilities

  • ● Design, build and maintain the backend services behind our real-time and analytical data processing.
  • ● Own features end to end, from shaping the approach to running them in production.
  • ● Optimise pipelines and services for low latency, high throughput and scale.
  • ● Work with engineers, product and stakeholders to stay aligned on direction.
  • ● Contribute to design reviews with a clear view on the trade-offs.
  • ● Keep your services healthy - observability, feedback loops, incident response.
  • ● Raise the bar around you through code review, pairing and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

  • ● + years as a software engineer, with production systems you've built and supported.
  • ● High ownership tendencies
  • ● Comfortable across multiple languages. We mainly use Kotlin, Java, Python and TypeScript.
  • ● Able to reason about trade-offs - throughput, latency, consistency, cost - and explain them.
  • ● At home in system design and in low-level implementation detail.
  • ● Hands-on exposure to Kafka, Flink, Redis or clustered Postgres, and an appetite for more.
  • ● Comfortable with agent-based development tools. We use Claude Code; any equivalent is fine.
  • ● A clear communicator and a pragmatic problem-solver.
  • ● NICE TO HAVE EXPERIENCE:
  • ● Data-intensive applications at scale.
  • ● Building and interpreting observability - metrics, logging, tracing.
  • ● Working within or alongside DevOps, SRE or infrastructure teams.
  • ● Complex distributed environments - high throughput, low latency, large datasets.
  • ● Any exposure to commodities, energy or financial markets. Useful, but we'll teach you the domain.

Benefits

  • ● 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 commodity trading intelligence
  • ● Top-tier tools and technology to support your success
  • ● WHAT'S THE CULTURE LIKE AT SPARTA
  • ● At Sparta, our culture isn't just a set of values on a wall - it's how we work. We embrace a dynamic environment where initiative is celebrated, challenges are met head-on, and innovation thrives. You'll collaborate with people who are passionate about our mission and committed to building outstanding products and outcomes for our customers.
  • ● THE SPARTA CODE
  • ● Understanding is non-negotiable
  • ● Understanding leads to believing. Believing leads to winning.
  • ● The 'why' is the difference between compliance and conviction. Before we execute, we ask: why does this matter, who does it serve, what changes if we win People who understand the mission don't need to be managed.
  • ● Ask for forgiveness, not for permission
  • ● Most decisions are reversible. Most fears are not.
  • ● % of decisions are reversible. Make them, ship, iterate. Perfection is the enemy of efficiency. Bias for action means moving before you have all the answers, but it isn't recklessness. The rule: tell the rest of us what you did, what changed, what you learned.
  • ● Fall in love with the problem
  • ● The mission wins. Your idea doesn't have to.
  • ● Solutions flatter our ego. They feel like progress. But solutions without problems are opinions, and opinions don't move customers, markets, or teammates. The goal is to find what's true, not to win the room. If your idea gets killed because a better one comes along, that's the system working.
  • ● It's your fault. Lucky you.
  • ● If it's on you, it's in your control.