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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.
This is a deliberate 50/50 split role combining backend engineering and site reliability engineering (SRE). Half your time focuses on designing and building distributed services and data pipelines that move real-time market data through the platform. The other half centers on reliability engineering: making systems observable, resilient, and cost-efficient to operate.
As a Backend/SRE Engineer, you will design, build, and maintain backend services for real-time and analytical data processing. You'll optimize pipelines and services for low latency, high throughput, and scale. You'll own features end-to-end, from shaping the technical approach to running them in production, and contribute to design reviews with clear trade-off analysis.
On the reliability side, you'll own the operational health of your services, define what healthy means, and measure it. You'll improve observability, monitoring, and alerting in Datadog so problems surface before traders notice. You'll participate in incident response and close the loop on root causes. You'll work with AWS Lambda, ECS, and EKS, helping move workloads onto Kubernetes. You'll help operate data and streaming infrastructure including Kafka, Flink, Redis/Valkey, RDS, and Redshift. You'll extend infrastructure-as-code in AWS CDK and improve CI/CD pipelines. A core focus is reducing toil by automating the manual and deleting the unnecessary.
You should have 4+ years as a software or reliability engineer with production systems you've built and supported. You need strong ownership tendencies and genuine interest in both halves of this role. You must be strong in at least one of Kotlin, Java, Python, or TypeScript, with solid AWS production experience across compute, networking, storage, and IAM. Hands-on infrastructure-as-code experience (AWS CDK, Terraform, CloudFormation) is required, as is practical Kubernetes experience. You should have CI/CD tooling experience, a habit of instrumenting what you build (metrics, logging, tracing), and experience being on-call for production incidents. Experience defining or working to service-level objectives is important. You should be comfortable with agent-based development tools like Claude Code.
Nice-to-have experience includes building or operating Kubernetes platforms (especially EKS), Datadog expertise, data/streaming systems (Kafka, Flink, Redshift, clustered Postgres), error budget experience, cloud security and compliance best practices, and exposure to commodities, energy, or financial markets.
Sparta is a remote-first company, but this role requires a hybrid working style with a typical week involving a couple of days in the London office, with flexibility built in.
