Backend engineering

• Design, build and maintain the backend services behind our real-time and analytical data processing.
• Optimise pipelines and services for low latency, high throughput and scale.
• Own features end to end, from shaping the approach to running them in production.
• Contribute to design reviews with a clear view on the trade-offs.

Reliability engineering

• Own the operational health of your services. Define what healthy means, then measure it.
• Improve observability, monitoring and alerting in Datadog, so problems surface before a trader notices.
• Take part in incident response, then close the loop on the root cause.
• Work with our runtime across Lambda, ECS and EKS, and help move more workloads onto Kubernetes.
• Help operate the data and streaming infrastructure you depend on: Kafka, Flink, Redis/Valkey, RDS, Redshift.
• Extend our infrastructure as code in AWS CDK, and our CI/CD pipelines.
• Reduce toil. Automate the manual, delete the unnecessary, make the next incident less likely.

• 4+ years as a software or reliability engineer, with production systems you’ve built and supported.
• High ownership tendencies.
• Genuine interest in both halves of this role. You want to write the service and own how it runs.
• Strong in at least one of Kotlin, Java, Python or TypeScript.
• A solid working understanding of AWS - compute, networking, storage, IAM - from running things in production.
• Hands-on with infrastructure as code: AWS CDK, Terraform, CloudFormation or similar.
• Practical experience running container workloads on Kubernetes: deploying, debugging, tuning.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and a clear view of a good delivery lifecycle.
• A habit of instrumenting what you build - metrics, logging, tracing.
• Experience being on the hook for production, incident response included, and calm when things are on fire.
• Experience defining or working to service-level objectives, or a clear sense of how you’d start.
• A strong urge to own and improve things - to spot what isn’t working and fix it.
• Comfortable with agent-based development tools. We use Claude Code; any equivalent is fine.
• A clear communicator and a pragmatic problem-solver.

• Building or operating a platform on Kubernetes, EKS especially.
• Datadog specifically.
• Data or streaming systems: Kafka, Flink, Redshift, clustered Postgres.
• Working to error budgets, and using them to make real prioritisation calls.
• Security and compliance best practice in cloud environments.
• 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.

Why Join Sparta?

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

What's the Culture Like at Sparta?

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.

The Sparta Code

Understanding 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.

Ask 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.

Fall 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.

Conflict 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.