Backend Engineer – Mid/Senior

Sparta

Backend Engineer building scalable real-time and analytical services for Sparta’s commodity trading platform. Owning features, optimising distributed systems, and supporting production reliability in a hybrid London role.

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

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing and maintaining backend services for real-time and analytical data processing, with a strong focus on optimizing performance and scalability. Proficient in multiple programming languages and cloud platforms, with a commitment to high ownership and effective collaboration.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Backend Service DesignKotlin, Java, Python, TypeScriptAWS or GCP DeploymentKafka, Flink, Redis, Clustered PostgresObservability and Incident Response

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Backend Service DesignReal-Time Data ProcessingAnalytical Data ProcessingSystem DesignLow-Level ImplementationPerformance OptimizationProduction System SupportCode ReviewKnowledge SharingCross-Functional Collaboration

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationPragmatic Problem-SolvingHigh Ownership Tendencies

Tools & Technologies

AWSGCPKafkaFlinkRedisClustered PostgresClaude Code

Industry Keywords

Data-Intensive ApplicationsDevOpsSREDistributed EnvironmentsCommoditiesEnergyFinancial Markets

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSGoogle Cloud PlatformJavaKafkaKotlinPostgresPythonRedisTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design, build and maintain backend services supporting real-time and analytical data processing
Own features end to end, from shaping the approach through production operation
Optimise pipelines and services for low latency, high throughput and scale
Collaborate with engineers, product and stakeholders on direction
Contribute to design reviews and articulate trade-offs
Maintain service health through observability, feedback loops and incident response
Raise engineering standards through code review, pairing and knowledge sharing

Requirements

What you’ll need

4+ years of experience as a software engineer
Experience building and supporting production systems
High ownership tendencies
Experience in a product-focused organisation and cross-functional work
Comfortable working across multiple languages, especially Kotlin, Java, Python and TypeScript
Ability to reason about throughput, latency, consistency and cost trade-offs and explain them
Comfortable with system design and low-level implementation detail
Experience building and deploying services on AWS or GCP
Hands-on exposure to Kafka, Flink, Redis or clustered Postgres
Comfortable with agent-based development tools; Sparta uses Claude Code, though equivalent tools are acceptable
Clear communication and pragmatic problem-solving
Nice-to-have: experience with data-intensive applications at scale; observability; DevOps, SRE or infrastructure teams; complex distributed environments; commodities, energy or financial markets
Right to work in the location in which the role is located

Benefits

Comp & perks

Flexible hybrid working style
Room to grow and accelerate your career
Ownership and meaningful impact
Equal opportunity employer promoting diversity