Staff Data Engineer

01We 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.

02Staff Data Engineer

At Sparta, we're on a mission to build the next generation of commodity trading platforms - replacing the fragmented tools traders depend 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 build their own custom formulas - turning raw market data into decisions.

At the heart of Sparta is a serious data engineering challenge. We're building a platform that enables the rapid development of reliable, scalable ETL pipelines - the foundation everything else depends on. As our data volumes grow and our product ambitions expand, the demands on that infrastructure grow with them. We're looking for experienced data engineers who are familiar with these challenges at scale, people who understand what it takes to keep a data platform performing as complexity increases.

We want people who thrive with ownership. At Sparta, you'll be handed problems, not solutions - and we expect you to run with them. Speed matters, autonomy is real, and we'd rather you move fast and course-correct than wait for permission. As a Staff engineer, you'll also be shaping the direction of the platform itself: engaging directly with stakeholders, contributing to product thinking, and investing meaningfully in the engineers around you.

This role can be based in the UK (London) or Spain (Barcelona, Madrid), and we would expect to spend some time together with the team in-office (2 -3 days a week).

03Core Responsibilities

• Play a leading role in the design, build, and ongoing evolution of scalable data pipelines and ETL frameworks that power both real-time and analytical data processing.

• Take shared ownership of the health and performance of our data platform - optimising for latency, throughput, and reliability at scale.

• Collaborate closely with engineering and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure data infrastructure aligns with product goals and trader-facing outcomes - acting as the connective tissue between data and backend engineering.

• Drive architectural decisions across our data platform, with a focus on pipeline reliability, data quality, and scalability.

• Contribute to the definition of our target architecture - shaping how we ingest, transform, store, and serve data as the platform evolves.

• Mentor and support other engineers through design reviews, technical discussions, and hands-on knowledge sharing.

04Skills & Experience

• 7+ years of experience as a data or software engineer, with a strong track record of delivering production-quality data systems.

• 2+ years working within a product-focused organisation, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams.

• Proven experience building and scaling data-intensive pipelines and platforms in production environments.

• Deep understanding of stream and batch processing frameworks - hands-on experience with Flink or Spark is essential.

• Comfortable working across multiple programming languages - we primarily work with Kotlin, Python, and TypeScript.

• Equally comfortable designing high-level architecture as diving deep into low-level implementation details.

• Experienced in designing and deploying data infrastructure in cloud environments such as AWS or GCP.

• Hands-on experience with core data infrastructure tooling such as Kafka, Redis, and/or clustered Postgres.

05Nice to have experience

• Familiarity with open lakehouse technologies, such as Apache Iceberg and dbt.

• Experience building data infrastructure to support AI agents - including low-latency retrieval and analytical interfaces.

• Experience leading teams or managing engineers, driving both delivery and technical excellence.

• Exposure to complex distributed environments with demanding constraints such as high throughput, low latency, or large-scale datasets.

06Working style

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.

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

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.

07Understanding 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.

08Ask for forgiveness, not for permission

Most decisions are reversible. Most fears are not.

90% 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.

09Fall 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.

True ownership sounds harsh until you feel how liberating it is. If every problem is yours, you stop spending energy on who to blame and start spending it on how to fix it. Effective leaders default to 'it's on me'. Not out of guilt, but out of agency.

10Conflict is a gift

Honesty is an expression of care.

Withholding feedback is choosing comfort over growth, yours and your colleague's. Staying silent deprives others of the chance to learn. We challenge openly and with positive intent. Done with care, this builds trust. Done with ego, it destroys it.

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.

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