Backend/SRE Engineer, Mid/Senior

Sparta

Backend/SRE Engineer building distributed services and reliable real-time data infrastructure for Sparta’s commodity trading platform. Owning observability, Kubernetes, AWS operations, and production resilience.

Posted 8/7/2026full-timeLondon • 🇬🇧 United KingdomSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in backend engineering and reliability engineering, with a strong focus on optimizing service performance and operational health. Proficient in AWS infrastructure management and container orchestration, ensuring high availability and low latency in production systems.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Backend EngineeringAWS Infrastructure ManagementKubernetes DeploymentCI/CD Pipeline DevelopmentIncident Response

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

KotlinJavaPythonTypeScriptAWS CDKTerraformCloudFormationKubernetesKafkaFlink

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationPragmatic Problem-SolvingHigh Ownership

Tools & Technologies

DatadogECSEKSRedisRDSRedshiftAgent-Based Development Tools

Industry Keywords

Service-Level ObjectivesOperational HealthComplex Distributed SystemsCloud SecurityCompliance

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Amazon RedshiftAWSCloudDistributed SystemsJavaKafkaKotlinKubernetesPostgresPythonRedisTerraformTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design, build and maintain backend services behind 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 trade-offs
Own the operational health of services and define and measure service health
Improve observability, monitoring and alerting in Datadog
Participate in incident response and address root causes
Work with Lambda, ECS and EKS and help move workloads onto Kubernetes
Operate Kafka, Flink, Redis/Valkey, RDS and Redshift infrastructure
Extend AWS CDK infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines
Reduce operational toil through automation

Requirements

What you’ll need

4+ years as a software or reliability engineer with production systems built and supported
High ownership tendencies
Genuine interest in backend engineering and reliability engineering
Strong proficiency in at least one of Kotlin, Java, Python or TypeScript
Solid working understanding of AWS compute, networking, storage and IAM from production use
Hands-on infrastructure as code experience with AWS CDK, Terraform, CloudFormation or similar
Practical experience running, deploying, debugging and tuning container workloads on Kubernetes
Experience with CI/CD tooling and understanding of a good delivery lifecycle
Habit of instrumenting systems with metrics, logging and tracing
Production ownership and incident response experience
Experience defining or working to service-level objectives, or a clear sense of how to start
Comfortable with agent-based development tools; Claude Code or equivalent
Clear communication and pragmatic problem-solving
Nice to have: Kubernetes/EKS platform experience, Datadog, Kafka, Flink, Redshift, clustered Postgres, error budgets, cloud security and compliance, complex distributed systems, or commodities, energy or financial markets experience

Benefits

Comp & perks

Hybrid working style with flexibility built in
Ownership, support, and room to grow
Equal opportunity employer promoting diversity