Technical Product Manager

We Are Sparta

Sparta is the next-generation commodity trading platform.
We give trading desks the clarity, control, and collaboration they need to move faster and trade smarter.

In February 2025, we secured $42 million in Series B funding. Now we’re scaling up across the business, and it’s an exciting time to join.

Our people are the driving force behind everything we do. At Sparta, you’ll be trusted to take ownership, backed by a team who wants you to succeed. You’ll be challenged, supported, and given room to grow. Because building something this ambitious takes everyone at their best.

At Sparta, your work has reach. From improving our platform, to powering smarter decisions for our customers, to changing how commodity trading is done around the world.

And because we’re growing fast, you won’t just build your career. You’ll accelerate it, with a level of ownership and impact you simply don’t get at bigger, more bureaucratic companies.

The Role

Sparta is the pricing platform physical energy commodity traders run their day on. The Technical Product Manager shapes how the Sparta platform gets built and how it lands inside our customers' organisations: the product itself, the platform beneath it, the AI capabilities we are building on top, and the architecture that delivers all of it into enterprise environments.

This is a technical role, not a coordination role. You work as a peer to engineers and product managers: you engage in the technical trade-offs directly rather than relaying them, you validate problems against data and code yourself, and your judgement carries real weight in what ships and in what we decide not to build.

You are a force multiplier for Sparta's product and engineering teams. You partner with commodity owners, product managers, designers and engineers to ship high-quality products on time, define delivery milestones, surface risk early and clear blockers. With sales and customer success, you help shape the architecture and engagement pattern for enterprise accounts so those teams can move faster. You will work across multiple Sparta products and energy commodity verticals.

A typical week

• Query the data yourself to answer a customer question before it reaches an engineer.

• Review an API or schema design and push back on a contract that will not survive a customer's integration.

• Read the pull requests behind a delivery to understand what actually happened, not what the status update said.

• Walk a customer's IT and security teams through how Sparta deploys into their environment, and come back with the two constraints that should change our design.

• Write a specification with data contracts, service levels and failure modes in it, not a feature list.

• Prototype with AI coding tools to de-risk a decision before the team commits to it.

• Make the case, in writing, for why we should not build something, and have it land.

• Leave a dozen plausible threads unpulled, and be able to say which ones and why.

Judgement is the job

With current AI tooling, anyone on the team can produce a working prototype in an afternoon. The scarce skill is knowing which of those prototypes deserves to become a product. We expect you to bring discernment and product taste: to say no to things that are easy to build and hard to justify, to write down why, and to be right often enough that engineers and commodity owners trust the call.

The same applies to your own time. This is a fast-moving product with more good ideas than hours, and you will never be short of threads to pull. What will distinguish you is the ability to separate signal from noise and prioritise with full business and technical context: knowing which three things matter this quarter, why the other thirty do not yet, and being able to defend that ordering to a trader, an engineer and the exec team in the same afternoon.

Over the next 6 to 12 months this judgement, not build throughput, is what will separate a good TPM from a great one at Sparta.

Core Responsibilities

• Drive the technical trade-offs on the products you support: architecture, data model, API contracts and the sequencing of delivery, worked through with engineers rather than handed to them.

• Accelerate enterprise engagements by resolving architecture, security and infrastructure questions early, alongside sales and customer success, so that deals do not stall on technical due diligence.

• Define data quality, latency and availability targets with the team, and hold everyone including yourself to them.

• Run technical discovery directly: against production data, against the codebase and against customer environments.

• Synthesise concrete technical goals from product vision, mapping product strategy to granular team objectives.

• Partner with commodity owners, product managers, engineers and customer-facing teams to drive deliverables through the full cycle: discovery, validation, implementation, release and support.

• Keep a complete picture of everything touching your projects. Identify and resolve dependencies, blockers and issues that would steer them off course.

• Align domain experts and technical experts around shared objectives, and fix miscommunication and lack of coordination where you see it.

What We Value

• Demonstrated success shipping complex data and AI centric software in an enterprise software company or startup.

• Comfort in the room with enterprise IT: architecture reviews, security questionnaires, infrastructure constraints, and the ability to turn all of it into a clear answer on how the product will run.

• Current, hands-on use of AI coding and agent tooling (Claude Code or equivalent), with a view on where it helps and where it does not.

• Product taste: a track record of good calls on what to build, what to cut, and when to stop.

• Ruthless prioritisation when there are more good options than capacity: comfort holding a long list of things you are deliberately not doing.

• Outcome orientation and a getting-things-done attitude, with a lightweight, rapid-iteration approach to project management.

• Demonstrated ability to influence and coordinate people who do not report to you.

• Strong relationships with customer-facing teams and real empathy for end users' needs.

• Attention to detail and a high product quality bar.

• Experience in a commodity trading or market data environment is a plus, not a requirement.

What We Require

• Hands-on engineering or data engineering experience: you have shipped and operated production code.

• Enterprise-scale experience of on-premises or hybrid architecture and deployment, and a clear view of the trade-offs against cloud-native delivery.

• Experience working directly with customer IT, security and infrastructure teams on how a product is deployed and operated in their environment.

• A working understanding of distributed systems, data platforms and API design.

• Daily use of AI development tools, with examples of what you have built with them and what you chose not to.

• 6+ years in software, including time as an engineer, and 3+ years in a TPM or technical PM role working across multiple engineering teams.

• UK or Spain based. We can sponsor a visa.

How We Assess

The process includes a 90-minute working session with a product manager and an engineer on a real Sparta problem, and a technical take-home assignment. If you would not enjoy either of those, this is probably not the role for you.

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.