Platform Engineer
sparta-commodities · London · hybrid
We 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.
Platform Engineer
Team: Platform Engineering. Level: Junior/Mid. Location: London, Barcelona or Madrid.
About the roleYou'll join our Platform Engineering team, which owns the tooling, automation and infrastructure that our development teams use to build, deploy and run their software. The role covers the full lifecycle. You'll help build the self-service platform that lets teams ship easily, work on the deployment tooling and pipelines that get their code into production, and help operate and support the infrastructure on which it all runs.
You'll need a solid grounding in AWS and cloud infrastructure concepts. It's a good fit for someone early in their career who wants to grow their platform, cloud, and Kubernetes skills while working on systems that every developer in the company depends on.
What you'll do- Contribute to the internal platform, tooling and automation that development teams use to build, deploy and operate their applications
- Develop and maintain infrastructure as code in AWS CDK, so our AWS environment is provisioned and managed in a repeatable, reviewable way
- Extend our CI/CD pipelines, including our ongoing migration from CircleCI to GitHub Actions
- Support the runtime across Lambda, ECS and EKS, and help move more of our workloads onto our Kubernetes-based platform (EKS)
- Operate and support data and streaming infrastructure, including Redshift, RDS, Kafka, Flink and Redis/Valkey
- Support development teams in resolving incidents, helping diagnose and fix infrastructure-related issues
- Improve observability, monitoring and alerting in Datadog so problems are caught early
- Document platform capabilities and help developers adopt them
What we're looking for- A strong urge to own and improve things - to look for things that aren’t working and make them better
- A good working understanding of AWS and core cloud infrastructure concepts such as compute, networking, storage and IAM
- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, whether AWS CDK, Terraform, CloudFormation or something similar
- A working knowledge of Kubernetes and container-based workloads
- Familiarity with CI/CD tooling and the software delivery lifecycle
- Comfort with at least one programming or scripting language (for example, TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, Python or Bash) and an interest in automating things
- Comfort working with agent-based development tools. We use Claude Code, but experience with any comparable AI coding agent is fine
- A collaborative, developer-focused mindset, and an interest in making other engineers' lives easier
- A willingness to learn, get stuck in, and take part in incident response
- Clear communication and a pragmatic approach to problem-solving
Nice to have- Experience building or operating a platform on Kubernetes, EKS, especially
- Experience with observability tooling, particularly Datadog
- Familiarity with data or streaming systems such as Redshift, RDS, Kafka or Flink
- Understanding of security and compliance best practices in cloud environments
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.
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.