Head of Trading Risk Engine

Our client is an established crypto infrastructure business expanding into trading. They are building a funded trading platform for crypto perpetuals, beginning with paper trading and moving toward evaluations, funded accounts and payouts. They are hiring a hands on leader to build and operate the trading risk engine behind that product. You will own the rules, exposure, hedging and payout economics that determine whether the platform can grow safely and profitably. This is not a compliance, audit or advisory position. You will make live risk and trading decisions, work directly with data and help build the underlying systems with Product and Engineering. The team intends to be aggressive on product. They are not looking for someone whose first response to risk is to block a feature, ban a trading style or tighten every limit. They want someone who can identify the real risk, quantify it and find a practical way to support the product through better pricing, smarter limits, targeted monitoring, trader segmentation, routing, hedging or staged rollouts. Restrictions should be precise and evidence based. Broad bans should be reserved for risks that cannot be measured or controlled. What You Will Own • The firm's trading book, aggregate exposure and risk appetite • Funded account rules, including drawdown, leverage, concentration and consistency parameters • Reliable payout reviews, payout liability forecasting and reserve requirements • Trader classification, including profitable, toxic, fraudulent and correlated behaviour • Decisions about which activity remains simulated, is internalised, is matched internally or is hedged externally • External hedging strategy and relationships with venues, liquidity providers and market makers • Net exposure by instrument, strategy, trader cohort and correlated account group • Margin, liquidation, circuit breaker and kill switch controls • Real time monitoring, alerts, incident response and daily risk reporting • Risk requirements for product, data and trading infrastructure • Recruitment and leadership of the future risk and dealing team Trading and Execution Responsibilities • Build the logic for A book, B book and hybrid routing across funded accounts • Determine when the firm should hedge positions on external venues and when exposure can remain internal • Measure shadow P&L so a trader's apparent profitability is tested against real fees, funding, spread, slippage and execution costs • Configure and continuously review leverage, margin requirements, available instruments, spreads, mark ups and other trading conditions • Monitor execution speed, fills, rejected orders, pricing anomalies, market gaps and platform incidents • Investigate toxic flow, latency arbitrage, coordinated trading, copy trading, multi account abuse and attempts to exploit payout rules • Lead the response during unusual volatility, system failures and concentrated exposure events • Produce clear recommendations and risk reports for the founders and senior leadership Product and Commercial Partnership You will be the risk voice in product discussions from the beginning. Your role is to make informed risk taking possible, not to remove risk from the business. For every proposed feature, instrument, promotion or rule change, you should be able to explain: • How trader behaviour may change and which risks matter • How expected payouts and unit economics could be affected • Which risks can be priced, limited, monitored, routed or hedged • How to launch without weakening the product proposition • Which evidence would justify expanding, changing or stopping the feature after launch The goal is not the lowest possible risk. It is to take the right risks deliberately, protect legitimate payouts and give the product room to win. What Success Looks Like Within your first six months, you will have: • Established measurable risk limits and clear escalation procedures • Built reliable exposure, payout and trader behaviour monitoring • Implemented systematic trader segmentation and routing • Created a fair and repeatable payout review process • Built a clear framework for deciding when to simulate, internalise, match or hedge trades • Validated hedging performance and external execution costs • Enabled ambitious product launches with controls proportionate to the actual risk • Created a scalable operating model for the risk and dealing function Ideal Background • Five or more years in trading risk, dealing, quantitative trading, market making or a closely related function preferred • Demonstrated ownership of live trading exposure is more important than tenure • Direct experience with funded trader platforms, retail FX or CFD brokers, crypto derivatives exchanges, proprietary trading firms or market makers • Strong knowledge of perpetuals, leverage, margin, liquidation, funding and market microstructure • Practical experience with A book and B book management, hedging, routing and liquidity providers • Experience analysing trader behaviour, trading abuse and correlated accounts • Comfortable using SQL, Python or equivalent tools to work directly with trading data • Able to translate risk logic into precise product and engineering requirements • Strong commercial judgement across growth, trader experience, payouts and firm profitability • Inventive and pragmatic, able to design controls that enable growth rather than defaulting to blanket restrictions • Calm and decisive during volatile markets and operational incidents This Role Is Not Suitable If • Your experience is primarily compliance, audit, credit policy or operational risk documentation • You have advised trading teams but never owned live exposure or execution decisions • You treat eliminating risk as the goal, or regularly default to saying no when a risk can be measured and managed • You prefer creating frameworks over implementing and operating them • You cannot work directly with data, engineers and imperfect early stage systems • You are unwilling to make time sensitive decisions when the trading book is at risk