Vice President - People

We Are Sparta

Sparta is the AI leader for commodity trading, home to Leonidas AI, the first operating system for oil and commodity traders.

Backed by $42 million in Series B funding led by One Peak, with participation from returning investors FirstMark and Singular, the same investors behind AI leaders like Legora, Dataiku, and Synthesia. Most companies are building a chatbot on top of data. We've built an agent with an actual reasoning layer, grounded in years of proprietary market data and in-house trading expertise nobody else has.

We're scaling fast, and it's an exciting time to join. From independents to multinationals, the world's leading commodity teams use Sparta and Leonidas AI to move faster, trade smarter, and stay ahead of the market.

At Sparta, you'll be trusted to take ownership, backed by a team who wants you to succeed. AI is how we build here, not just what we sell. Good ideas move fast, and yours could go from staging to production in a couple of hours, whatever department you're in. You'll be challenged, supported, and given room to grow, building the AI that's changing how commodity trading gets done.

Your work has reach. From shaping Leonidas AI, to powering smarter decisions for traders around the world, to changing how commodity trading is done. And because we're growing fast, you'll accelerate your career with a level of ownership and impact you simply won't get at bigger, slower-moving companies.

The Role

Location: London or Geneva. In-office, with flexibility for 1–2 days per week from home.

Reporting to the CEO and managing a team of 3 in People, you'll be Sparta's most senior People leader. Working directly with the CEO and leadership team, you'll define and execute the people strategy required to scale the organisation, ensuring we have the leadership, capability, culture and organisational structure necessary to achieve our long-term growth ambitions.

We're looking for someone with the strategic ability to grow into a CPO role as Sparta scales.

You'll be shaping and scaling the People organisation, building the structure, capability and leadership needed to support Sparta's next phase of growth: compensation and levelling, performance, leadership development, hiring and organisation design, while ensuring the overall People strategy remains aligned to business objectives. Much of what this role owns needs to be improved, perfected or redesigned, so you'll be hands-on from day one, building frameworks and running processes personally before you're managing others through them. You'll be central to building a consistent, high-performance culture across our distributed teams globally.

What You'll Be Doing

• Develop and execute Sparta's global people strategy, ensuring organisational structure, capability, culture and talent are aligned to support the company's growth from Series B through its next stage of scale, whilst balancing local employment, cultural and regulatory considerations

• Act as a strategic advisor to the CEO, Executive Team and Board on organisational design, leadership capability, succession planning, workforce risks and culture

• Build our compensation architecture: salary bands, a levelling framework, and a consistent, transparent approach to pay across geographies.

• Introduce a structured performance process and individual scorecards, so everyone knows what success looks like for them.

• Build our leadership pipeline through talent reviews, succession planning and management development. Give managers the confidence and authority to make more decisions themselves and address people problems early.

• Lead organisation design, ensuring Sparta's operating model, spans and layers, leadership structure and workforce planning evolve appropriately as the business scales internationally. Partner with Finance and functional leaders to develop workforce planning and capability strategies that support Sparta's growth objectives

• Own talent acquisition strategy and delivery. Work with Marketing and the TA team to grow our employer brand so more great people come to us.

• Own Learning & Development: coaching, training, and levelling up managers and individual contributors

• Provide executive oversight of workplace and employee experience across all locations. Partner closely with the Executive Team and other leaders to align hiring philosophy, location strategy, and expectations across Sparta's distributed teams

• Represent People at the leadership table. Raise risks early and make sure stakeholders always know where things stand

What Success Looks Like in Your First Year

• Executive Team aligned around a clear people strategy

• Leadership effectiveness and manager capability measurably improved

• Workforce plan linked to business objectives

• Salary bands and a levelling framework live

• Individual scorecards in place, so everyone knows what success looks like for them

• A structured performance review running company-wide, with buy-in from key stakeholders

• A middle-management empowerment programme in place, with managers visibly making more decisions without escalating to the exec team

• Succession plans in place for key roles

• Hiring on track against plan, with quality and retention holding up

About You

• You've been the most senior People leader in a scaling organisation, or held a Director or VP People role with significant strategic accountability

• You've worked in a Series B–D SaaS or tech scaleup and know the people challenges of that stage first-hand

• You've personally built compensation, levelling and performance frameworks, and you can point to what you built and the impact it had

• You can influence founders, boards and senior executives, and challenge constructively when it's needed

• You're commercially minded. You find workable compromises and build frameworks that fix problems for good

• You've led organisational change across distributed, multi-country teams, not just rolled out HR programmes. Sparta has people across London, Geneva, Spain, Singapore, Houston, and Dubai - familiarity with local laws, regulations and cultures in these locations is a distinct advantage

• You take ownership, move with urgency and are comfortable being hands-on

• You communicate clearly and proactively

• You want to grow this role into a CPO seat

• Experience scaling a tech business from around 100 to 300+ people is a big plus

We care more about what you've achieved, and how relevant it is to our stage, than about a specific number of years' experience.

Why Join Sparta?

At Sparta, our culture is built on innovation, collaboration, and high performance. We thrive in a fast-paced environment where initiative is celebrated, challenges are embraced, and impact is rewarded.

• Equity in a high-growth, VC-backed company

• $42M in Series B funding — strong market traction and investment

• Early-stage growth — build your career as we scale

• Market-leading product — we are redefining commodity trading intelligence

• Top-tier tools and technology to support your success

What's the Culture Like at Sparta?

At Sparta, our culture isn't just a set of values on a wall — it's how we work. We embrace a dynamic environment where initiative is celebrated, challenges are met head-on, and innovation thrives. You'll collaborate with people who are passionate about our mission and committed to building outstanding products and outcomes for our customers.

The Sparta Code

Understanding is non-negotiable

Understanding leads to believing. Believing leads to winning.

The 'why' is the difference between compliance and conviction. Before we execute, we ask: why does this matter, who does it serve, what changes if we win? People who understand the mission don't need to be managed.

Ask for forgiveness, not for permission

Most decisions are reversible. Most fears are not.

90% of decisions are reversible. Make them, ship, iterate. Perfection is the enemy of efficiency. Bias for action means moving before you have all the answers, but it isn't recklessness. The rule: tell the rest of us what you did, what changed, what you learned.

Fall in love with the problem

The mission wins. Your idea doesn't have to.

Solutions flatter our ego. They feel like progress. But solutions without problems are opinions, and opinions don't move customers, markets, or teammates. The goal is to find what's true, not to win the room. If your idea gets killed because a better one comes along, that's the system working.

It's your fault. Lucky you.

If it's on you, it's in your control.

True ownership sounds harsh until you feel how liberating it is. If every problem is yours, you stop spending energy on who to blame and start spending it on how to fix it. Effective leaders default to 'it's on me'. Not out of guilt, but out of agency.

Conflict is a gift

Honesty is an expression of care.

Withholding feedback is choosing comfort over growth, yours and your colleague's. Staying silent deprives others of the chance to learn. We challenge openly and with positive intent. Done with care, this builds trust. Done with ego, it destroys it.

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.