Backend Engineer

Hi, we’re Sparta Commodities!

Sparta is revolutionising commodities trading. Our mission is to bring the latest technology the commodity trading market and become the leading platform for commodities traders and analysts everywhere. Built for traders by traders, our technology pulls together real-time market data and adds insight and advanced analysis and unique detailed workflow modelling to enable traders to make better decisions, faster and with more conviction.

We’ve just closed our Series B, and we’re scaling globally. It’s a great time to join us, and we have a fantastic opportunity available for a driven Backend Engineer to join our Engineering organisation. 

This is a great career opportunity for an experienced, delivery-focused leader to play a key role in shaping the company culture as it moves from start-up to scale-up. 

We are looking for someone who has had ownership of projects from inception until after release, and who is familiar with observability, product metrics, and maintainability.

Day-to-day, you will work hands-on within a product team leading and developing features, mentoring other engineers, reviewing code and documentation, and promoting initiatives to improve our code quality, maintainability, and development experience.

We have a Backend guild with members from all product teams to lead the architectural evolution of our services. You can be one of the guild leaders, responsible for reviewing proposals from other guild members.

About You

• High ownership and accountability for projects.
• High communication skills in a remote-first company.
• Knowledge of big data/streaming/real-time data frameworks, with practical experience in architectural design and data warehousing solutions. We work with Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, AWS Redshift, web sockets…
• Practical experience with modern software engineering techniques and best practices (version control, CI/CD, unit test, integration test, functional test, observability, writing documentation…). We work with GitHub, Test Containers, Datadog…
• Practical experience in AWS cloud services. We deploy them with CircleCI and CDK.
• Very good command of Java/Kotlin. We will need you to be very comfortable with this stack.

Bonus Points

• In your career you may have known other backend technologies such as Typescript, Python or Scala.
• Graph databases like Neo4J with big datasets.
• Experience with gRPC and Protocol Buffers for efficient service communication.

What's it like working at Sparta? 

Our culture is not just a set of values written on a wall—it's how we want to be: initiative is celebrated, challenges are met head-on, and innovation thrives. 

We're building an environment where we thrive and excel in our work. Our aim is for every member of our team to take pride in their contributions. You'll collaborate with like-minded individuals who are passionate about our mission and deeply committed to crafting outstanding products and achieving success for our customers.  

We operate flexibly, understanding that a thriving, profitable company isn't just about being in the same location. We build our relationships through effective remote work methods and carefully planned in-person meet-ups. 

Our values:

• Just own it: At Sparta, accountability is not just a buzzword- it’s a way of life. We believe in taking ownership of our work, challenges, and successes. When you join us, you’re not just an employee- you’re a stakeholder, driving our collective success through a mindset of ownership.
• Don’t get too comfortable: Innovation thrives in discomfort. Embrace change, seek new challenges, push your boundaries. Growth and success lie beyond the comfort zone.
• Ask for forgiveness, not permission: we value initiative and boldness. Take calculated risks, be proactive, don’t be afraid to make decisions. Learning from mistakes is as important as celebrating achievements.
• Put the customer at the heart of every action: customer satisfaction isn’t just a goal- it’s our guiding principle. We go the extra mile to understand and meet customer needs.
• Stay hungry, yet humble: ambition fuels progress, and humility keeps us grounded. Stay hungry for knowledge, achievements, and growth, but never lose sight of the importance of empathy and gratitude.
• Collaborate and challenge: great ideas emerge when diverse groups of minds come together. Collaboration is more than just teamwork- it’s the fusion of different perspectives, challenging norms and collectively achieving greatness.