About Us
In partnership with one of the largest financial conglomerates, we are creating a secure, transparent, and high-performance trading infrastructure that can support institutional volumes while remaining accessible to retail participants. Our strategy to achieve this is by first bringing in Japanese RWAs on-chain, and then eventually all kinds of global assets. We are building a next-generation DeFi L1 blockchain powered by a decentralized exchange with a fully on-chain order book, supporting both spot and perpetual trading, and more.
Position Overview
You already have strong, specific opinions about how Hyperliquid, Aster, dydx, and Drift have made their product choices. You follow the design space — funding mechanisms, oracle construction, ADL versus insurance-fund tradeoffs, cross- versus isolated-margin accounting — closely enough to argue for a position, not just summarize what others have shipped. You probably actively trade perps yourself.
We are seeking a Senior Product Manager, Trading with deep, hands-on experience shipping product at an orderbook trading venue to work on Strium – a DeFi L1 blockchain with an on-chain orderbook exchange. You will own a core surface of the exchange — order types and margin, the programmatic / API trading surface, or listings and risk parameters — and ship its v1 in partnership with engineering, risk, and our market making partners.
You will operate as the primary product interface to market makers and high-volume traders, translating their requirements into specifications that engineering can build against, and pushing back when the right answer for the venue differs from the loudest voice. You will define how we measure ourselves against similar products such as Hyperliquid, Aster, dydx, and the DEXs that matter, and run honest reviews against those benchmarks.
This role offers an opportunity to shape the product direction of our exchange at an early stage, working alongside a distributed team of engineers and traders building next-generation financial infrastructure. You will start by shipping v1 of your core surface, and over time help expand the venue's surface area into adjacent territory — lending markets, hedging and basis-trade flows, structured surfaces — as the product matures. The role reports to the Head of Product.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the product strategy and v1 spec for a core trading surface — order types and margining, the programmatic / API surface, or listings and risk parameters. The specific surface will be aligned in the first week.
- Act as the primary product interface to market makers and high-volume traders, turning their input into spec and maintaining a coherent product direction across competing requests.
- Drive the listings pipeline end-to-end:
- Define which markets to list, on what timeline, and against which benchmark venues.
- Set initial market parameters: leverage caps, tick / lot size, funding cap, oracle source, margin requirements.
- Coordinate engineering, risk, and MM readiness for each launch.
- Partner with engineering on the matching engine, risk engine, and API contracts, contributing to spec reviews and design decisions such as ADL versus insurance-fund design, cross- versus isolated-margin accounting, and oracle integration.
- Define and track product success metrics — depth, slippage, fill rate, API latency, listings velocity, MM uptime etc.
- Build and maintain the competitive intelligence function for the exchange: deeply understand what competitor venues have shipped, what they got right, and where the open ground is.
- Write the specs, RFCs, and MM briefs that align engineering, risk, and external partners. Pre-product is a writing-heavy role.
- Act as the primary product interface to institutional and incumbent-finance counterparties, translating their requirements into specifications and maintaining a coherent venue direction across these stakeholders.
- Beyond v1 of your initial surface, contribute to the design of adjacent surfaces — lending markets, hedging and basis-trade flows, structured surfaces — and seed the groundwork during early shipping so future expansion is not a rewrite.
Requirements
Exchange Product Experience
- 5–8 years of product management experience, with 2+ years shipping product at an orderbook trading venue (derivatives, CEX or DEX).
- You worked on the trading or exchange team.
- You have owned a roadmap with market makers and institutional traders as a real stakeholder.
Trading Literacy
- Fluent in trader vocabulary: funding, basis, skew, taker / maker, ADL, oracle slippage, latency-sensitive flow.
- Familiarity with the operational mechanics of perp markets — liquidation engines, insurance funds, cross- and isolated-margin, funding rate design, mark price construction.
- Strong, specific opinions about other DEXs' product choices: what they got right, what's still open, and what you would do differently.
- You actively trade perps with non-trivial volume.
Product Craft in Ambiguity
- Track record of shipping in pre-PMF environments. You can define your own surface and scope rather than executing against an inherited roadmap.
- Comfortable making decisions without a research team behind you.
Communication & Writing
- Excellent written communication. Your specs, RFCs, and memos align people without requiring meetings.
- Ability to communicate clearly with both engineers and external trading partners, in their own register.
- Japanese language proficiency is preferred but not required, given regular engagement with Japanese partners and counterparties.
Technical Fluency
- Technical enough that engineers respect you in design review.
- Comfortable reading code and understanding what's happening under the hood.
Big Bonus
New Venue Launch
- You have launched a new orderbook trading venue from zero.
Quant or Trading Background
- You have done quant, market-making, or trading work yourself, in a professional or serious personal capacity.
Onchain Risk Infrastructure
- Experience with oracle design, liquidation auctions, or cross-margin accounting on-chain.
Asia Market Context
- Familiarity with Japanese or APAC capital markets, retail trading culture, or institutional trading workflows.
- Lending Protocols
- Familiarity with the design space of on-chain lending and money markets (Aave, Morpho, Drift's lending surface, etc.) and how they interact with leveraged trading.
- Hedging & Structured Products
- Experience with hedging desks, basis-trade flows, or structured products from traditional finance or crypto.
- Incumbent Finance Product Experience
- You have shipped product inside or alongside an incumbent financial institution — a broker-dealer, prime broker, established exchange, or asset manager — and understand how they evaluate, integrate, and operate trading venues.
Why Join Us
- Shape the product – a DeFi L1 chain powered by an orderbook perp DEX – that aims to bring TradFi on-chain, in partnership with one of Japan's largest financial conglomerates.
- Operate with great autonomy and influence the architecture of trading infrastructure at the earliest stage.
- Collaborate with a world-class, distributed engineering team building purpose-designed exchange infrastructure.
- Competitive compensation, with equity / stock options available when conditions are met.
- Remote, with overlap with APAC working hours. Hybrid in Tokyo or Singapore preferred.
- Growth opportunities in a rapidly evolving space.
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