Crypto Markets & Trading Lead

About Optimum

Optimum is building the world's first data acceleration network for any blockchain. Powered by Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), Optimum scales network speed, robustness, and throughput by orders of magnitude.

Co-founded by Muriel Médard, co-inventor of RLNC, and a team of industry experts, Optimum introduces a breakthrough in Web3 infrastructure. Our infrastructure enables high-speed data propagation, fast access, and secure updates, scaling the world computer. Backers include 1kx, Spartan, Robot Ventures, Finality Capital, Triton Capital (fka Kraken Ventures), CMT Digital, SNZ, and others.

Learn more at getoptimum.xyz

About the role

Optimum is building infrastructure that can give sophisticated market participants earlier access to valuable blockchain information and execution opportunities.

We are looking for someone with direct experience in crypto trading markets to work alongside our Product and Data teams and help us understand where Optimum can create differentiated, monetizable value for traders.

You will bring the perspective, network, and market understanding of a trader into the company: helping us identify valuable problems, test product hypotheses with the right market participants, quantify opportunities, and represent trader needs internally.

You will work closely with Product and Data, as well as with BD, particularly as we develop Signal and explore new products for trading firms.

What you'll do

• Develop a deep understanding of how crypto trading firms operate, where information and latency matter, and where infrastructure limitations create economic opportunities.

• Build and maintain relationships with traders, quantitative trading firms, market makers, and other relevant market participants.

• Lead and support customer discovery: identify the right people to speak with, run conversations, and turn feedback into actionable product insights.

• Act as the internal advocate for traders, helping the Product and Engineering teams understand their workflows, incentives, constraints, and priorities.

• Conduct focused market research on new product opportunities, including market sizing, competitive analysis, and pricing potential.

• Work with the Data team to analyze blockchain and market data and quantify the potential value of different product hypotheses.

• Build lightweight analyses and simulations to answer questions such as: Who benefits? How much could this be worth? Under what conditions?

• Help evaluate and prioritize opportunities based on actual market evidence rather than intuition alone.

• Support the path from early product hypothesis to a clearly valuable and monetizable offering.

• Stay close to changes in crypto market structure, MEV, execution infrastructure, trading strategies, and emerging market participants.

What we're looking for

• Direct professional experience in crypto trading, quantitative trading, market making, or a closely related market-structure role.

• Strong understanding of how professional crypto trading firms make money and evaluate infrastructure, data, and execution products.

• Existing relationships within the crypto trading ecosystem and the ability to get high-quality conversations with the right market participants.

• Ability to move comfortably between qualitative market conversations and quantitative analysis.

• Strong commercial judgment: able to distinguish an interesting technical capability from customer value.

• Ability to communicate trader workflows and market dynamics clearly to product, engineering, business development, and research teams.

• Comfortable operating in an early-stage environment.

Particularly valuable

• Experience with MEV, block building, order flow, preconfirmations, low-latency infrastructure, or blockchain market structure.

• Experience evaluating or purchasing market data, execution infrastructure, or trading APIs.

• Ability to work directly with datasets using SQL, Python, notebooks, or similar analytical tools.

How you'll work

You will work particularly closely with our Product, Data, and Business Development teams.

What we offer

• Work on hard problems at the edge of networking, blockchain market structure, and decentralized systems.

• Ownership from day one - you will define methodology, not just apply it.

• Close collaboration with a small, senior, cross-functional team.

• Competitive compensation, equity, and flexibility.

• Flexible time off.

• Fully remote

• Work from wherever you do your best thinking. Most of the team operates on ET or CET, so we look for meaningful overlap with those windows (at least 5 hours per day).