---
title: 'Senior Backend Engineer at Sparta'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-sparta-london-0e682c6zk5gw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Senior Backend Engineer at Sparta

- **Company:** Sparta
- **Location:** London, United Kingdom
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-25
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sparta-commodities/9ae9ab91-79b7-460e-8cb5-06ef044e67ae

## Job description

We Are Sparta

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 real distributed systems problems on a daily basis, where designing for reliability and performance at scale is essential to a seamless user experience. As we unlock the next level of scale, those problems get harder and more interesting. This role is for an engineer who wants to own meaningful parts of that system now, and grow into the technical decisions that shape it.

We’re looking for people who thrive in an empowered environment - engineers 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. You won’t be handed tickets. You’ll be handed context, and trusted to work out the right thing to build.

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:

- 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.

## ABOUT YOU:

- 4+ years as a software engineer, with production systems you’ve built and supported.
- High ownership tendencies
- Experience in a product-focused organisation, working cross-functionally.
- 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.
- Experience building and deploying services on AWS or GCP.
- 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.

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.

## About Sparta

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sparta provides a forward-looking market intelligence and analytics platform purpose-built for oil trading desks, delivering real-time pricing, predictive signals, and a collaborative workspace.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $42M raised in March 2025 led by One Peak; total funding $65.5M)
- **Headquarters**: Geneva, Switzerland
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Felipe Elink Schuurman and Miles Moseley

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Oil & Gas (commodity trading) / Energy
- **Target customers**: B2B – trading houses, oil majors, refineries, hedge funds, and financial institutions operating in global oil markets
- **Mission/purpose**: Give trading teams the operating system they’ve always needed – real-time, forward-looking, and collaborative, designed for how commodity trading actually works

## Products & Services
- **[Sparta Platform](https://www.spartacommodities.com/)**: A unified workspace connecting physical and financial oil markets. Features include real-time pricing, forward curves, live arbitrage signals, blend margins, freight intelligence, and expert market commentary.
- **[Predictive Signals Platform](https://www.spartacommodities.com/)**: AI-powered trading signals, live forecasts for arbs, freight, and blend margins, over/undervaluation scores, and market dislocation alerts.
- **[Data Marketplace](https://www.spartacommodities.com/)**: Access to thousands of proprietary and third-party datasets delivered via API, SFTP, or bulk download, standardized for direct integration into models and dashboards.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metrics**: Annual revenue estimated at $5M–$25M (LinkedIn estimate); Total funding $65.5M (Seed $6M in 2022, Series A $17.5M in 2023, Series B $42M in 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: One Peak (led Series B), FirstMark (led Series A), Singular (led Seed round); partnerships with 30+ leading brokerages and data houses
- **Growth Signals**: 107 employees (+19.6% YoY); offices across 9 countries (US, Switzerland, UK, Spain, UAE, Singapore, Austria); regularly cited by Bloomberg, Reuters, and Financial Times

## Competitive Advantages
- Only forward-looking predictive analytics platform built specifically for oil trading desks, connecting physical and financial markets in one workspace
- Co-founded by veteran oil traders with 37+ years combined experience – built “by traders, for traders”
- Real-time, shared view of the full market with instant updates across cracks, arbs, margins, and blends
- Strong data moat with 5+ years of partnerships and thousands of standardized datasets

## Strategic Focus
- Continue expanding the “operating system for commodity trading” with deeper AI-driven forecasting and automation
- Scale the Data Marketplace and predictive signal capabilities for crude, refined products, and freight
- Grow global presence across US, Europe, and Asia (recent offices in Dubai, Singapore)

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “Sparta Code” emphasizes ownership, bias for action, honest feedback, and a “fall in love with the problem” mindset. Values include making reversible decisions quickly, treating conflict as a gift, and understanding the ‘why’ behind every mission.
- **Work model**: Hybrid workspace – employees combine remote and on-site work across 6+ global offices (Geneva, Houston, New York, London, Madrid, Valencia, Singapore, Dubai, Vienna)
- **Notable perks**: Autonomy and trust; flat hierarchy where “ask for forgiveness, not permission” is encouraged; strong backing from top-tier VCs; exposure to fast-growing energy tech sector
- **Engineering culture**: Focus on building a high-performance, collaborative environment; leadership includes Chief Technology Officer Tom Gorenbar Peled and Chief Product Officer

## Sources
1. [spartacommodities.com - About](https://www.spartacommodities.com/about/)
2. [spartacommodities.com - Careers](https://www.spartacommodities.com/careers/)
3. [linkedin.com - Sparta Commodities](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sparta-commodities)
4. [builtin.com - Sparta Commodities SA](https://builtin.com/company/sparta-commodities-sa)

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