Senior Trader

About Decibel

Decibel is a high-performance, fully on-chain trading platform built in collaboration with Aptos Labs and the Decibel Foundation. Designed to match the speed of high performance trading, Decibel offers spot, perpetuals, and yield products through a unified, self-custodial interface. The platform runs on the Aptos blockchain, leveraging its sub-20ms block times and parallel execution to support real-time settlement, cross-margining, and modular vault strategies. Decibel aims to serve as the execution layer for the Aptos global trading engine, empowering traders, developers, and institutions with scalable, composable financial infrastructure.

Position Overview

The Senior Trader – Market Making & Liquidity is a mission-critical leadership role responsible for managing the exchange’s internal trading desk and driving liquidity across all markets. This role is not about running a prop desk for profit — the primary objective is to ensure tight spreads, deep order books, and high-quality execution for every trader on the platform.

You’ll lead the design and operation of our internal market making strategies, collaborate with external liquidity providers, and work closely with product, engineering, and risk to continuously optimize market structure. The ideal candidate is a low-latency market making execution expert with deep experience in limit orderbook-based markets, crypto perps, and market microstructure, and a track record of building and managing trading systems that prioritize market liquidity.

Key Goals & Responsibilities

Liquidity Optimization & Market Quality

• Own liquidity outcomes across all trading pairs — spreads, order book depth, fill quality, uptime.
• Monitor key metrics such as 1bps/5bps/50bps depth, order book imbalance, and realized spread slippage.
• Build and iterate on a liquidity scoring framework that evaluates each market’s health in real-time.

Internal Market Making Desk Ownership

• Operate the internal MM infrastructure responsible for quoting across all pairs
• Set quoting parameters that adjust dynamically based on volatility, open interest, volume, and inventory.
  Develop execution monitoring to track toxic flow, inventory risk, pnl markouts, or systemic risk and market risk.

Execution Systems & Infra

• Collaborate with engineers to implement robust market making bots, position monitors, and risk limits.
• Ensure all internal trading systems are latency-optimized, fault-tolerant, and production-ready.
  Monitor and upgrade trading strategies to adapt to new market conditions and user behavior patterns.

New Market Launch Readiness

• Own the liquidity readiness checklist before every new market launch.
• Coordinate with listings, infra, and product teams to ensure day-1 launch includes deep liquidity and robust quoting.
• Analyze volatility, backtest slippage profiles, and stress test for potential manipulation or withdrawal of liquidity.

Market Structure & Trading Incentive Design

• Advise on product decisions like new market tick size, maker-taker fees, margin design, and auction mechanisms.
• Advise on market microstructure design to optimise liquidity for the exchange.
• Optimize incentive spend by analyzing ROI of trading campaigns across pairs and timeframes.

External MM Management & Ecosystem Coordination

• Coordinate with external market makers, ensure alignment between their behavior and the exchange’s liquidity goals.
• Monitor external MM contribution and alert for underperformance or withdrawal of liquidity.

Market Monitoring & Circuit Breaker Readiness

• Build alert systems for sudden drops in book depth, OI concentration, thin books, or abnormal spreads.
• Collaborate with Head of Risk to define market risk monitoring, market actions and intervene in volatile scenarios.
• Post-mortem abnormal events using quantitative tools — identify root causes and update safeguards.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Work with Product to shape exchange design toward better liquidity quality.
• Collaborate with Engineering to build real-time dashboards, quote engines, and latency profiling tools.
• Align with Risk to ensure trading behavior is within safe bounds and not leading to systemic fragility.
• Coordinate with marketing and growth team to stand up liquidity for newly listed markets

Personality & Skills

• Execution-obsessed: You’re an expert at execution and detail oriented.
• Microstructure fluent: You understand market microstructure and understand how to model different market microstructure outcomes.
• Collaborative operator: You can lead a team and coordinate across engineering, product, and risk.

Background & Experience

• 5+ years of trading or market making at a crypto exchange, HFT firm, or market maker.
• Proven track record managing liquidity for crypto perpetuals or derivatives products.
• Deep understanding of order book dynamics, latency-sensitive trading systems, and market maker behavior.
• Experience with internal MM systems or designing trading execution logic.
• Bonus: Experience building quoting engines or inventory/risk-based pricing models.
• Strong technical fluency — Python, time-series databases, quantitative modelling.
  
  

Our Benefits

• Insurance premium coverage 
• Flexible vacation time
• Competitive Salary
• Protocol Token Grants

Decibel Foundation is committed to diversity in the workplace, and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need.