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Sparta

BACKEND ENGINEER (MID/SENIOR)

London
Posted 1 day ago
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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.

Reasons to use Rodeo

I’m in my final year doing Economics and I don’t know whether to apply for grad schemes now or do a masters first. What do you think?

Honest answer — it depends on where you want to end up. A lot of top grad schemes (Big 4, civil service, banking) don’t need a masters. Let’s look at the ones you’d be competitive for now, and we can decide if a masters actually adds anything.

Also worth knowing: most autumn 2026 applications are open now. Timing matters more than you think.

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Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.

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Graduate Consultant — 2026 Scheme

PwC·London, UK
£35,000/yr

Why you're a good match

Strong

Your economics background and your summer at a regional bank line up with what PwC looks for on the consulting scheme. Applications close in four weeks.

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It searches the market for you

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Why you're a good match

You’ve got the grades and the economics background, and your bank internship is exactly the experience this scheme looks for. Apply soon — deadlines close within the month.

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Strong

Experience fit

Your summer at the bank plus your econometrics coursework map directly to the day-one responsibilities on this scheme — client modelling, market briefings, and deal support.

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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.

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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.

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Skills

Kotlin
Java
Python
TypeScript
System Design
Distributed Systems
AWS
GCP
Kafka
Flink
Redis
Postgres
Observability
Data Processing
Low Latency
API Development

Location

London, England, United Kingdom

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