Head of Product

About hermeneutic Investments

hermeneutic Investments is a leading proprietary trading firm and hedge fund specializing in research-driven discretionary and systematic strategies along with strategic long-term investments. The firm’s decade-long track record showcases success in trading and business growth. Its culture is strongly built on alpha generation, open dialogue, continuous iteration, and teamwork. The company prioritizes risk management and seizes market opportunities, positioning itself for sustained future growth despite challenging market conditions.

Role Overview

We are a discretionary cryptocurrency trading firm where traders and researchers make informed decisions leveraging proprietary datasets, tools, and workflows. Our competitive advantage depends heavily on both the expertise of our staff and the quality of internal systems supporting market investigation, hypothesis testing, risk assessment, and execution with confidence.

This founding Head of Product role is key to establishing a dedicated product function from the ground up. Currently, product activities are scattered across various teams. Your mission is to lead discovery, prioritization, requirements gathering, roadmap management, product quality assurance, user adoption, and eventually build a product management team.

Our “product” consists solely of internal, proprietary solutions designed for our expert users: traders, researchers, and engineers. We do not produce retail-facing products. Understanding deep user workflows, identifying impactful problems, and delivering systems tailored to these needs are the core responsibilities.

Initially, you will engage hands-on by working alongside traders and researchers, drafting early product requirements, and setting standards for how we conduct product work. As the scope grows, you will hire and guide a small team of product managers while staying closely connected to user needs.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and operationalize the product management discipline within the firm including problem discovery, requirement capture, specification writing, trade-off evaluation, adoption measurement, and user feedback cycles.
• Own and maintain the internal trading and research systems product roadmap in collaboration with CIO, engineering, and trading/research leadership, balancing immediate user concerns with foundational platform needs such as data accuracy, provenance, tooling reliability, and scalability.
• Work directly with expert users (traders/researchers) to thoroughly comprehend their investigation and decision workflows identifying the highest-impact system improvements.
• Convert vague user requirements into clear, evidence-based product specifications that detail business context, workflow steps, data assumptions, behavior expectations, edge cases, success criteria, and trade-offs to guide engineering.
• Promote trust, explainability, and transparency in internal systems by ensuring clear data lineage, source tracking, explainable metrics, and human-centered decision making.
• Serve as liaison among trading, research, engineering, and management teams to clarify trade-offs, challenge assumptions constructively, and facilitate strategic prioritization.
• Initially serve as sole product leader, then recruit and develop a product management team while embedding high standards for discovery, specification, and product culture aligned with high-performance trading.

Typical Duties

• Spend extensive time collaborating with traders and researchers to grasp real decision-making processes and challenges.
• Distinguish deeper user needs from overt feature requests to uncover true product opportunities.
• Translate complex workflows into actionable product requirements and decisions.
• Produce precise product requirements for internal systems, data products, analytics, and decision-support tools.
• Work closely with engineering to develop scalable, practical solutions and identify trade-offs early.
• Prioritize product initiatives based on impact on trading, research, risk, and operations.
• Define success metrics such as research velocity, data quality improvements, risk reduction, and product adoption.
• Advocate for foundational infrastructure work even when less visible than front-end features.
• Evaluate external data sources and tool vendors for integration potential and performance.
• Establish product management practices, documentation standards, and constructive feedback cycles.
• Provide guidance to the CIO on product strategy and prioritization.
• Hire and lead a dedicated product team as scale requires.

Essential Qualifications

• Over 10 years of product management experience, including senior leadership roles in complex, technical, data-centric environments.
• Track record building or scaling product management functions, with hiring, standard setting, and multi-stakeholder coordination.
• Deep familiarity with internal platforms, expert-user workflows, trading or research systems, financial technology, data infrastructure, or similar complex domains.
• Ability to engage highly specialized users, understand nuanced workflows, and clarify ambiguous requirements into clear product actions.
• Strong technical and data expertise including querying, dataset validation, and partnered engineering architectural discussions.
• Exceptional skill in crafting precise and outcome-focused product specifications.
• Sound product judgment to balance requests, escalate trade-offs, and decisively commit to directions.
• Excellent written communication to document key decisions, requirements, and trade-offs clearly.
• Ability to maintain rigor and speed in a fast-paced, real-money trading environment.
• Independent decision-making capabilities and constructive dispute resolution skills.

Preferred Experience

• Background at hedge funds, proprietary trading firms, quantitative managers, market makers, crypto trading companies, or financial data/platform providers.
• Knowledge of cryptocurrency markets including spot, perpetuals, funding, liquidity, on-chain analytics, token unlocks, explorers, and market microstructure.
• Experience assessing market, on-chain, alternative data, and third-party data providers.
• Work with globally distributed teams.
• Familiarity with research, analytics, risk management, execution, and portfolio monitoring workflows.
• Hands-on skills with SQL, Python, Jupyter notebooks, or similar data investigation tools.

Recruitment Process

• Resume review based on qualifications and experience.
• Initial phone screening with HR to assess background and motivation.
• Technical interview with CTO on experience and knowledge.
• Secondary interview with COO focused on technical fit and role suitability.
• Final interview with Co-Founder to evaluate cultural alignment and values fit.

Company Values

• Drive: Passion for work fuels growth and excellence.
• Ownership: Taking initiative and aligning with company goals.
• Judgment: Focusing on impactful decisions and outcomes.
• Openness: Encouraging constructive conversation and knowledge sharing.
• Competence: Intellectual strength utilized adaptively in changing environments.
• Resilience: Maintaining calm and focus under pressure, learning from setbacks.