Junior Backend Developer

• This is a full-time position with a permanent contract.
• This role is based in London. We provide WeWork memberships, with the flexibility to work from home.

What is Spark Commodities?

Founded in Singapore in early 2019, Spark is a company with offices in London and Singapore focused on improving how people understand price and trade physical commodities. We are backed by three leading companies within the energy ecosystem: Kpler, ICE, and EEX, and we rely on amazing people to build amazing products. We currently work with over 200 companies, including some of the world's biggest energy and financial players.

Our small but growing team brings together people from diverse backgrounds, combining varied skill sets and international experience. We prioritise execution, agility, and ownership to deliver meaningful impact quickly.

What Does the Role Involve?

• Learn about how the commodities pricing industry works.
• Build meaningful products that our customers use and depend on for everyday business.
• Use every learning and observation to improve our products continually.
• Own what you build, with the ability to decide how to build it (subject to current stack and compliance rules), and take responsibility for operating it in the production environment.
• Own the full development lifecycle, from shaping specifications to building, testing, deploying to production, and maintaining what you ship.
• Share knowledge about newly developed features with the company's stakeholders.

Our Team and Culture

• We Are Builders At Heart.
• We are builders at heart, a collective of independent, deep thinkers.
• Curious, committed, and humble, we're dedicated to making a real impact.
• We value open, honest, and feedback-driven collaboration, with a strong product-first culture.
• The best idea wins, and we're always open to better ways of doing things.
• We use AI tools at every stage of the company, relying on them daily to move faster and improve how we work.
• We're building a fully distributed team across London, Singapore, and France.
• We default to writing, meet when it matters, and optimise for deep work.
• You'll have real ownership and a direct impact on the company's success.

You Would Be a Great Fit if You:

• You value software craftsmanship and take pride in building well-designed software that steadily delivers value.
• You have a strong sense of ownership and care about what you build.
• You're a builder at heart, with an entrepreneurial mindset and a desire to make things work long-term.
• You're eager to learn or already comfortable scaling and operating services in growth environments.
• You're proficient in a couple of languages. Functional programming experience is a plus. Our current platform is mostly Python (with some TypeScript and SQL), and we're evolving toward a more structured codebase:
• Concepts like clean/hexagonal architecture, DDD, CQRS, event sourcing, and event-driven systems are familiar to you.
• AI is part of your development workflow: you leverage it daily to build faster and smarter.
• You care about quality: you write tests, ship complete features, and keep codebases clean and maintainable.
• You deliver iteratively, moving fast while learning at each step.
• You make decisions based on data rather than opinions, and you're comfortable finding the data when it's missing.
• You're comfortable with changing priorities and see them as opportunities rather than obstacles. You're also willing to challenge the status quo.
• You're excited about making a strong impact in a growing startup.

Our Hiring Process

We see hiring as a human process, a two-way conversation to see if there is a good fit between you and us. As a startup, we also like to keep things streamlined.
An idea of your hiring journey with us:

• A meeting with one of our engineers or CTO to introduce each other and explore mutual interests.
• A conversation of 1.30 hours max with two engineers to assess your technical skills. We will ask you to show some code you developed, explain how it works, and describe the technical challenges you faced.
• A 30-minute open-minded conversation with our CEO to get to know each other and see whether you would be excited to work together.
• Offer

We aim to give you the best candidate experience, keep you updated and be transparent with our feedback along the way.