Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Startale Group is partnering with one of the largest financial conglomerates to create a secure and high-performance trading infrastructure. They are seeking a Senior Product Manager, Trading to lead the product strategy for their DeFi L1 blockchain, Strium, focusing on building and shipping a core trading surface while collaborating with engineering, risk, and market makers.
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
Skills
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Technical enough that engineers respect you in design review
- Comfortable reading code and understanding what's happening under the hood
- Japanese language proficiency is preferred but not required, given regular engagement with Japanese partners and counterparties
- You have launched a new orderbook trading venue from zero
- You have done quant, market-making, or trading work yourself, in a professional or serious personal capacity
- Experience with oracle design, liquidation auctions, or cross-margin accounting on-chain
- Familiarity with Japanese or APAC capital markets, retail trading culture, or institutional trading workflows
- 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
- Experience with hedging desks, basis-trade flows, or structured products from traditional finance or crypto
- 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
Benefits
- Compensation aligned with our Global Salary Standard plus equity.
- Unlimited time off.
- Stock options.
- Annual workations (most recent: Seoul, Tokyo, Croatia, Turkey, Belgium).
- Premium tooling from machine to AI agents.
- 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.
Company Overview