Head of Trading Risk Engine

The Role Our client is expanding from trading infrastructure into retail trading through its retail trading product, which processes about $1B monthly. Backed by $17M from Lightspeed, Coinbase and angels including Mark Cuban, they are launching a crypto-perpetuals prop firm. We need a hands-on leader to build and run its risk engine, owning rules, exposure, hedging and payout economics. You will make live decisions, analyse data and build systems with Product and Engineering. This is not compliance or advisory. Quantify real risk and enable ambitious products through pricing, precise limits, monitoring, segmentation, routing, hedging and staged rollouts. Use broad bans only for unmeasurable, uncontrollable risks.

What You Will Own

• Trading book, risk appetite and exposure by instrument, strategy, cohort and correlated group
• Funded-account rules, payout reviews, liability forecasts and reserves
• Classification of profitable, toxic, fraudulent, coordinated and correlated traders
• Decisions to simulate, internalise, match or hedge; plus venue, liquidity-provider and market-maker relationships
• Margin, liquidation, circuit breakers, kill switches, monitoring, incident response, reporting and the future risk/dealing team

Trading, Execution and Product Build

• A/B/hybrid routing; decide when exposure remains internal or is hedged
• Measure shadow P&L after fees, funding, spreads, slippage and execution costs
• Set leverage, margin, instruments, spreads, mark-ups and trading conditions
• Monitor execution, fills, rejections, pricing anomalies, market gaps and incidents
• Detect toxic flow, latency arbitrage, copy/coordinated trading, multi-account abuse and payout exploitation; lead responses to volatility, failures and concentrated exposure
• For every product change, explain effects on behaviour, payouts and unit economics; available pricing, limits, monitoring, routing or hedging; the launch approach; and evidence to expand, change or stop.

Desired Candidate Profile

Ideal Background

• Five-plus years in trading risk, dealing or similar preferred; live-exposure ownership matters more than tenure
• Experience in funded trading, retail FX/CFDs, crypto derivatives, prop trading or market-making
• Knowledge of perpetuals, leverage, margin, liquidation, funding, microstructure, A/B-book management, hedging, routing and liquidity providers
• Analyse behaviour and abuse with SQL/Python, then translate risk logic into product and engineering requirements
• Commercial, inventive and decisive under volatility; protects legitimate payouts and profitability without blanket restrictions

Not Suitable If

• Your background is mainly compliance, audit, policy or documentation; you have not owned live exposure or execution; you prefer frameworks to operations; cannot work with data, engineers and imperfect systems; or avoid time-sensitive book decisions.