Senior Data Engineer

Sparta; United States; Remote; USD 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company that is revolutionizing the commodity trading industry with innovative data solutions. As a Senior/Lead Data Engineer, you will play a crucial role in refining and optimizing data ingestion and ETL processes. Collaborate with a talented team to design cloud data infrastructure and mentor junior engineers. Enjoy the flexibility of 100% remote work while contributing to impactful projects that leverage data to create value for customers. If you are passionate about data engineering and eager to grow within a dynamic environment, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Medical and dental insurance

23 days holiday

Co-working space expenses covered

Qualifications

• Extensive experience with Python and SQL for data manipulation.
• Expertise in relational and NoSQL databases with ETL experience.

Responsibilities

• Build new data ingestion pipelines and manage data quality.
• Mentor junior team members and influence cloud data infrastructure.

Skills

Python

SQL

AWS

Data Warehousing

Kafka

Unix/Linux

Data Governance

DevOps/MLOps

Communication Skills

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Jira

Confluence

Job description

Sparta is revolutionising the commodity trading industry with a B2B SAAS that does away with the Excel spreadsheets that traders have been working with for decades.

Sparta is a company that has revolutionized commodity trading with a B2B SAAS that eliminates spreadsheets. Currently, they are in a growth phase. Are you a data and development lover and would you like to learn more about them? Read on :)

Let's take a look back to see how they arrived at this point... Come with me ;)

The journey began in 2019 when Felipe (CEO) and Miles (COO) decided to leave the world of oil trading behind them, having worked in this field for more than 35 years. They had realised that the wave of digitalisation and new technologies had not yet reached the commodities trading market. Joined by Luis (CTO), they took the plunge and decided to set up Sparta, with the focus on automating, optimising and increasing the productivity of commodities traders.

To be a good trader, you have to know how to make decisions. To do so, you need to have all the relevant information at your fingertips so that you can take advantage of market opportunities and be faster than the competition. This is where Sparta has revolutionised the industry, as its platform not only aggregates the most relevant information, but also processes it and allows traders to communicate with their teams quickly and efficiently in the cloud. In addition, they allow trading firms to create their own databases featuring the most relevant historical information in order to learn from past experiences. This all takes place in the cloud and is therefore accessible from anywhere, meaning remote work is possible in a sector in which it is not at all common.

At the end of 2020 they launched their MVP on web and iOS and since then the product has grown at a dizzying pace. This 2022 was looking like an amazing year after validating and starting to iterate the tool after the launch, and it has been! They closed a 6M round at the beginning of the year to be able to grow faster and now there are 50 people shaping the great product they have in their hands, providing maximum value to the user with each feature.

Sparta is looking to expand its data engineering capabilities. They are looking for Senior/Lead Data Engineers to work alongside their VP of Data, data team, and development teams to refine and optimise the current data ingestion, ETL, and cleansing models.

The day-to-day work involves building new data ingestion pipelines using Python, SQL and AWS; data wrangling, management and standardisation; data quality analysis and cleansing; and applying best practices in software development.

In the future they are planning to utilise their big data to build machine learning models and uncover hidden insights, but first, they must build a good foundation to ensure their long-term success.

You will get to influence their cloud data infrastructure design, take ownership of end-to-end data projects, and liaise with other parts of the business to ensure that they can leverage their data to create value for customers.

The type of person they are looking for is someone who brings their experience to the table, who is hungry and helps them to continue to grow. A team player, who likes to share and learn in equal parts and whose objective is to continue to grow and help the team to find solutions for each challenge. Of course, you'll always be given the freedom to do what you do best.

The first month will be about settling into the team, getting to know people and getting used to working 100% remotely (if you don't have previous experience with this). They want you to have a say and will value the feedback you can give them about the way they do things, right from day one. Every member of the team is important for Sparta's growth and, of course, they want you to help them evolve all aspects of the organisation.

During the first month, you'll become familiar with the dynamics of the team and the market in which they operate. You'll also be introduced to theproduct dynamics and you'll participate in team sessions aimed at understanding the data feed to work with, and determining the best way to process and store it.

You'll be responsible, along with the rest of the team, for organising the infrastructure of the data acquisition and processing side in order to grow Sparta's product.

You'll assist in selecting, designing and implementing data warehouses for different situations (Redis, Kafka, Time-based databases...).

You'll analyse the performance of data storage and queries in order to improve it where possible.

You'll extract large datasets from different sources, standardising and storing them for use.

You’ll mentor junior members of the team.

The data team consists of a VP of Data and six Data engineers. They all have an input and decision-making power, so when the team decides to do something, it gets done.

The CEO and COO are the people with the market expertise and the ones who get the market data feeds that they'll use. Most of the data standardisation and processing requirements will come through them. However, they know that most of the time, the best features and ideas come from the technical team so they'll be happy to hear new ideas and discuss them with you.

They work in an Agile framework with Jira so that nothing gets left behind, and they document everything in Confluence so that the information is always accessible ;)

They have Retros every two weeks to help the team develop and Refinement at the beginning of each Sprint so that everything is well defined.

At Sparta, staff really DO enjoy flexible working hours. The only thing they ask is that all members of the team are available during a particular time slot so that you can coordinate (you know, the daily, the Retro, meetings to discuss decisions, etc.).

Jornada laboral

Flexible

Remoto

100%

Sparta began as a 100% REMOTE company. Felipe is based in Geneva, Miles in London and Luis in Basel and from that structure they have been growing.

The team is distributed throughout Spain, the UK and Switzerland and they strongly believe in the advantages of working remotely and in work-life balance:)

However, your expenses will be covered if you'd prefer to work in a co-working space.

What's more, they plan to meet up in person from time to time in a chosen location, so that it's not all virtual. Whenever they get together it is always a great success!

The team is well-balanced, experienced and well-oiled ️.

New staff will be added, but to date the team consists of20 peoplemaking the product a reality :).

• Felipe Elink (CEO) - Has more than 15 years of experience in oil trading, particularly petrols and biofuels inBPandGunvor(the fourth largest oil trading company in the world). He's Spanish, married and has three children.
• Miles Moseley (COO) - Has 20 years of experience in petrol trading at BP. He's English, married and has two children.
• Luis Ibáñez (CPO) - Has spent ten years working as a programmer and another five managing development teams. He has worked in Spain, London and Switzerland. His latest venture was with Roche Pharmaceuticals. He has twice built teams from scratch and his ideas for keeping team members happy involve doing everything he expected to be done when he was a programmer.
• Paul Laight (CTO) - He has 20 years of experience building highly complex products, platforms, companies and teams within the FinTech space.
• Miranda Chong (VP of Data) - She has spent the past 13+ years working with all things data. She is passionate about leveraging data to create insights, with hands-on experience in building and productionising data pipelines and machine learning models. For the past 7 years she has built, mentored, and managed large and small teams, in various technology-driven domains, and in corporate and start-ups alike. Her role in Sparta is to build out the data capabilities and long-term roadmap to support Sparta's growth strategy.
• Javier López (Staff Data Engineer) - Javi is a born leader. With almost ten years of experience as a programmer in backend, machine learning and big data, he is key to the evolution of Sparta's product as well as to the medium-and long-term vision of the team.
• Carlos Pérez (Senior Data Engineer) – Expert Data Engineer. With more than 15 years of experience, Carlos is a key member of the Data team. Since joining the team, he has helped to improve the algorithms for real-time data cleansing and data management.

Among them, there are some realmanfredites... And more coming soon .

• Extensive experience with Python for ingesting, manipulating and loading data and expertise in using SQL to query, standardise, extract and load data
• Expert understanding of relational databases and a good understanding of NoSql databases
• Experience in real-time/streaming data ETL (kafka preferred)
• Practical experience of modern software engineering techniques and best practices (version control, CI/CD, unit test, integration test, functional test, writing documentation..)
• Knowledge of Big Data/streaming data frameworks, with practical experience in architectural design and data warehousing solutions
• Practical experience in AWS cloud services
• Expertise in using Unix / Linux at the command line to perform software development and maintenance
• Very good communication skills (both oral and written), and An advanced level of English: Sparta is a multinational company.The data team is diverse, and all meetings are in English.
• Experience in DevOps or MLOps
• Knowledge in productionising Data Science models
• Good understand of data governance and security

Flexible working hours, although they want to coincide with the rest of the team for four working hours.

Medical and dental insurance on a reimbursement basis.

23 days holiday

And also...

Yes, but for administrative reasons, they can manage recruitments in Spain, the UK and Switzerland.

No, they're a very agile team and this is reflected in the process itself.

• There'll be an initial meeting with the CTO, VP of Data, or Staff Data Engineer
• Technical interview, with two of our Data Engineers
• Final interview with another member of the team to solve your last doubts and check your fit in the company.