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Company Overview
hermeneutic research is a best-in-class proprietary trading firm. It deploys research-driven discretionary and systematic strategies as well as makes strategic long-term investments. The partners' decade-long history of success in trading and business building and a firm-wide cultural emphasis on alpha generation, open debate, relentless iteration, and teamwork are key to the firm's continued expansion in a challenging market environment that has hamstrung competitors. A hard-wired emphasis on risk management and opportunistic market participation ensure that hermeneutic research will continue its growth trajectory in the coming decades.
Job Overview
We are a discretionary crypto trading firm where traders and researchers make high-conviction decisions using proprietary data, tools, and workflows. Our edge depends not only on the quality of our people, but also on the internal systems that help them investigate markets, test ideas, understand risk, and act quickly with confidence.
This is a founding Head of Product role. Today, product work is handled across trading, research, and engineering. Your mandate is to build the product function from the ground up: discovery, prioritization, requirements, roadmap ownership, product quality, adoption, and eventually the team.
At our firm, “product” means internal, proprietary systems built for our own traders, researchers, and engineering teams. We do not build retail products, and we do not serve external customers. Your users are expert practitioners inside the firm. Your job is to understand their workflows deeply, identify the highest-leverage problems, and ensure engineering builds the right systems to solve them.
You will start hands-on. You will sit with traders and researchers, understand real decisions and investigations, write the early requirements yourself, and establish the standards for how product work should be done. As the scope grows, you will hire and lead a small product team while staying close enough to the trading and research to retain a first-hand understanding of the problems we are solving.
Responsibilities
Product Function and Operating Model
Build the product discipline for the firm. Define how we discover problems, capture requirements, write specifications, review trade-offs, measure adoption, and close the feedback loop with users.
Internal Product Roadmap
Own the roadmap for internal trading and research systems in partnership with the CIO, engineering, trading, and research leadership. Balance immediate practitioner pain points with longer-term platform foundations, including data quality, provenance, tooling reliability, and system scalability.
Practitioner Discovery
Work directly with traders and researchers to understand real workflows: how they investigate opportunities, evaluate data, form hypotheses, monitor positions, assess risk, and make decisions. Your job is to understand the underlying decision process and identify what system capability would create the most leverage.
Requirements and Product Quality
Translate ambiguous practitioner needs into clear, evidence-backed requirements that engineering can build from. Requirements should capture the business context, user workflow, data assumptions, expected behavior, edge cases, success measures, and relevant trade-offs.
The goal is not simply to reduce questions from engineering. The goal is to reduce avoidable ambiguity, surface trade-offs early, and ensure the team is building the right thing for the right reason.
Trust, Explainability, and Source Transparency
Ensure our internal systems are built for trust. Traders and researchers should be able to understand where a number came from, what assumptions sit behind a calculation, why a signal changed, and when human judgment is required.
Data lineage, source transparency, explainable calculations, and human-in-the-loop decision-making should be default product principles.
Stakeholder Alignment
Act as the connective tissue between trading, research, engineering, and management. You will surface trade-offs clearly, challenge assumptions constructively, and help the firm make better prioritization decisions.
Team Building
Start as the sole product leader, then build the team as the work scales. Hire and develop product managers, set the bar for discovery and specification quality, and create a product culture suited to a high-performance trading environment.
What you'll do
Spend significant time with traders and researchers to understand real decisions, workflows, investigations, datasets, and pain points.
Distinguish stated feature requests from underlying practitioner needs.
Translate trading and research workflows into product opportunities, clear requirements, and buildable product decisions.
Write clear product requirements for internal systems, workflows, data products, analytics, and decision-support tools.
Partner closely with engineering to shape feasible, scalable solutions and surface technical trade-offs early.
Prioritize product work based on expected trading, research, operational, or risk impact.
Define success measures for product work, including faster research cycles, better data quality, reduced manual work, improved decision confidence, risk reduction, stronger adoption, or, where measurable, PnL contribution.
Defend foundational work — such as data quality, lineage, reliability, and platform architecture — when it is more important than a visible front-end feature.
Evaluate external data providers and tooling vendors where relevant, including API quality, coverage, latency, reliability, cost, and integration complexity.
Establish product rituals, documentation standards, and feedback loops.
Advise the CIO on product priorities, practitioner needs, product-engineering trade-offs, and sequencing.
Hire and lead a small product team once the scope requires it.
Requirements
Must Have
10+ years of product management experience, including senior product leadership in complex, technical, data-intensive environments.
Experience building or scaling a product function, including hiring product managers, setting standards, and managing product work across multiple stakeholders.
Strong experience with internal platforms, expert-user workflows, trading systems, research tooling, market data, financial technology, data infrastructure, or similarly complex product environments.
The ability to work with highly specialized users, understand their workflows deeply, and translate ambiguous needs into clear product decisions.
Strong technical and data fluency. You should be comfortable querying data, inspecting unfamiliar datasets, sanity-checking quality, and working closely with engineers on architecture and trade-offs.
Excellent requirements-writing ability. You can produce specifications that are faithful to the user problem, clear enough for engineering, and tied to a business or workflow outcome.
Strong product judgment. You know when to challenge a request, when to gather more evidence, when to escalate a trade-off, and when to commit once a decision is made.
Clear written communication. We operate with a strong writing culture; important decisions, requirements, and trade-offs should be documented.
The ability to move quickly without becoming sloppy. You can keep pace with trading and research cycles while maintaining rigor in a real-money environment.
Independent judgment and the ability to disagree well. You can make a constructive argument with evidence, remain calm under pressure, and align behind a decision once it is made.
Highly Valuable
Experience at a hedge fund, proprietary trading firm, quant manager, market maker, crypto trading firm, or financial data/platform company.
Familiarity with crypto markets, including spot, perpetuals, funding rates, liquidity, on-chain data, unlock schedules, block explorers, and market microstructure.
Experience evaluating market data, on-chain data, alternative data, or other third-party data providers.
Experience working with globally distributed teams.
Familiarity with research, analytics, risk, execution, portfolio, or monitoring workflows.
Hands-on experience with SQL, Python, notebooks, analytics tools, or similar ways of investigating data directly.
Interview Process
CV Screening – We will review your application based on the qualifications and experience outlined above.
Phone Interview – A discussion with the Head of HR to better understand your background, career motivations, and overall alignment.
First Interview – Interview with the COO to further explore your experience, technical skills, and role fit.
Second Interview – Interview with the CTO, focusing on your experience, motivation, and general technical knowledge.
Co-Founder Interview – A concluding discussion to evaluate cultural fit, strategic alignment, and how you resonate with the firm’s values.
Company Values
Throughout the process, you'll be assessed for cultural fit through our company values:
Drive – We believe the best team members are deeply passionate about what they do. That passion fuels their growth, drives them to seek out the best teams, and leads them to hold high expectations of themselves in pursuit of excellence.
Ownership – We aim to extend ownership as broadly as possible across the firm. In return, we value people who take initiative, step up when needed, and treat the company’s goals as their own.
Judgment – We value those who see the big picture and focus on what truly drives impact and results. They use time wisely, adapt across domains, and always prioritize outcomes over comfort zones.
Openness – We foster a culture of open communication, mutual challenge, and shared growth. We believe constructive debate and proactive knowledge sharing lead us closer to the truth—and better decisions.
Competence – We work with people who bring exceptional intellectual strength. What sets them apart isn’t just what they know—it’s how they use what they know to navigate change, adapt quickly, and contribute meaningfully in fast-changing environments.
Resilience – We perform under pressure. Markets move fast, and so do we—but we stay grounded, focused, and calm. We embrace uncertainty, learn from setbacks, and adapt quickly without losing sight of long-term goals.
