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Sparta is a next-generation commodity trading platform that provides trading desks with clarity, control, and collaboration tools to move faster and trade smarter. The company recently closed a $42M Series B round and is scaling rapidly across the business.
As a Backend Engineer, you will design, build, and maintain the backend services powering Sparta's real-time and analytical data processing platform. The role offers significant ownership—you'll own features end-to-end, from shaping the technical approach to running systems in production. You'll optimize data pipelines and services for low latency, high throughput, and scale, working across a distributed systems architecture that handles complex commodity trading workflows.
Key responsibilities include designing and maintaining backend services, optimizing for performance and reliability, contributing to system design reviews with clear trade-off analysis, maintaining service health through observability and incident response, and raising engineering standards through code review and knowledge sharing. You'll work cross-functionally with engineers, product, and stakeholders to align on technical direction.
You should have 4+ years of production software engineering experience with systems you've built and supported. Strong ownership tendencies and experience in product-focused organizations are essential. You're comfortable across multiple languages (Kotlin, Java, Python, TypeScript) and can reason about trade-offs in throughput, latency, consistency, and cost. You have hands-on experience with AWS or GCP, and exposure to Kafka, Flink, Redis, or clustered Postgres. Experience with data-intensive applications at scale, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and distributed systems is highly valued. Domain knowledge in commodities or financial markets is a nice-to-have but not required.
Sparta is remote-first but seeks someone who values hybrid work, typically 2 days per week in the London office with flexibility. The role offers the opportunity to tackle meaningful distributed systems problems, accelerate your career through high ownership and impact, and shape the technical decisions that define the platform.
