sparta-commodities - Vice President, People
Requirements
• 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.
Responsibilities
• 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
Benefits
• 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.
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