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 del