The posting
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.
Sales Development Representative
You've done the SDR thing before. You know what a good day looks like, you know what a stalled sequence looks like, and you know the difference between genuinely personalised outreach and a mail merge with a first name in the subject line.
We're hiring an SDR in Houston/Austin to own outbound across Americas (USA, Canada, LATAM). You'll be working with senior traders at oil trading houses, refiners, shipping companies, and physical commodity firms — sophisticated audiences who expect outreach that reflects a real understanding of their world.
You'll need to prospect like an analyst, write like someone who knows the market, and use AI thoughtfully to scale personalisation across more accounts than would otherwise be possible.
This is not a training role. We want someone who can land in week one, build a plan, and start booking meetings that move the business forward.
What you'll do
- Own your territory. You'll build the Americas (USA, Canada, LATAM) outbound motion from the ground up — segmenting accounts, mapping buying committees, and prioritising based on signal. You decide who to go after and why, and you defend that decision with data.
- Run multi-channel sequences that actually convert. Email, LinkedIn, phone, video — orchestrated, not stacked. You'll build and run sequences on Hubspot, test variants, and refine what's working. We expect you to have a point of view on cadence, copy, and channel mix.
- Use AI to make personalisation scalable. You'll use AI tools daily — researching accounts, drafting first-touch copy, generating relevance hooks from earnings calls, news, and market signals. The goal is outreach that's genuinely tailored to each prospect, sent across more accounts than manual research alone would allow.
- Qualify well. You'll be speaking with heads of trading, refinery economics teams, market analysts, and risk leads. You'll understand their workflow well enough to ask thoughtful follow-up questions — not just the first one off a discovery template.
- Book meetings worth taking. Quality over quantity. You'll be measured on what converts to pipeline, not what hits the calendar.
- Partner with marketing and sales. You'll feed back what's landing and what isn't, help shape ICP refinement, and work with our AEs to run targeted plays into priority accounts.
- Learn the market. Crude, products, freight, refining margins — you don't need to trade the book, but you need to ramp fast enough that a Head of Trading takes you seriously on a cold call.
What we're looking for
- 2–4 years of SDR / BDR experience in the Americas, ideally in B2B SaaS sold into financial services, trading, or commodities
- A track record of hitting quota — and the metrics to back it up. Meetings booked, opportunities generated, pipeline sourced, conversion rates. Come prepared to talk numbers.
- Demonstrable use of AI in your workflow. Tell us which tools you use, what you've automated, and where you've seen lift. We're looking for genuine fluency, not surface-level familiarity.
- Hands-on with our stack. HubSpot, Outreach and ZoomInfo. You don't need expert-level command of all four on day one, but you should be fluent in at least two and quick to pick up the rest.
- Sequence fluency. You've built and iterated on outbound sequences before. You know what your reply rates are. You know why.
- Sharp written communication. Short, specific, and credible. You write outreach that senior buyers actually read.
- Phone confidence. Cold calling is part of the job. You need to be comfortable picking up the phone and holding a substantive conversation with a senior person.
- Self-direction. You'll have support, but no one is going to hand you a list and tell you what to send. You build the plan.
Bonus Points
- Experience selling data, analytics, or SaaS into trading desks, refiners, or shipping.
- Secondary language in Spanish or Portuguese.
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.
