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Optimum is building a data acceleration network for blockchain infrastructure using Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) technology. The company is backed by leading crypto and venture investors including 1kx, Spartan, Robot Ventures, and others.
In this role, you will serve as the bridge between Optimum's Product and Data teams and the crypto trading market. You will bring deep market expertise and trader perspective to help identify where Optimum's infrastructure can create differentiated, monetizable value for professional trading firms.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop deep understanding of how crypto trading firms operate, where information and latency create economic opportunities, and how infrastructure limitations impact their business
- Build and maintain relationships with traders, quantitative trading firms, market makers, and other market participants
- Lead customer discovery: identify the right stakeholders, conduct conversations, and translate feedback into actionable product insights
- Act as internal advocate for traders, helping Product and Engineering teams understand workflows, incentives, constraints, and priorities
- Conduct 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, quantifying the potential value of different product hypotheses
- Build lightweight analyses and simulations to answer key questions: Who benefits? How much value? Under what conditions?
- Help evaluate and prioritize opportunities based on market evidence rather than intuition
- Support the path from early product hypothesis to clearly valuable and monetizable offering
- Stay current on changes in crypto market structure, MEV, execution infrastructure, trading strategies, and emerging market participants
You will work closely with Product, Data, and Business Development teams in an early-stage environment.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Direct professional experience in crypto trading, quantitative trading, market making, or 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 ability to secure 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 interesting technical capability from actual 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
