Senior Product Manager, Trading

Startale Group is partnering with one of the largest financial conglomerates to create a next-generation trading infrastructure. They are seeking a Senior Product Manager, Trading to own the product strategy for a core trading surface and act as the primary interface to market makers and high-volume traders, ensuring the product meets their needs while maintaining a coherent direction.

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:

• 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