Grove Labs - Head of Trading & Market Structure

Who We Are

Grove Labs — a subsidiary of Steakhouse Financial — is a blockchain research and development organization focused on next-generation decentralized credit infrastructure. It designs and builds the Grove Protocol, an institutional-grade credit platform that acts as a liquidity engine for decentralized finance and a capital bridge between DeFi and traditional markets. The team is multidisciplinary, working across credit, engineering, risk, and governance to shape the future of institutional DeFi.

Role Overview

As Head of Trading & Market Structure, you will be responsible for developing and operating trading activities where active market participation supports Steakhouse’s asset management, vault, and risk businesses. The initial focus is running market-neutral and delta-neutral strategies — including basis and funding capture — across centralized venues and on-chain infrastructure. You will help define standards for how trading capital is deployed, how risk is measured and controlled, and how trading integrates with underwriting, product design, and engineering.

Responsibilities

• Own the basis book: define trade selection, sizing, guardrails, and maintain near-zero net delta.

• Choose the best hedges (dated futures vs perps vs forwards), and manage term structure, rolls, and funding-rate regimes with clear attribution.

• Execute across venues (CME, regulated venues, major CEX/DEX), managing routing, slippage control, and incident playbooks.

• Optimize collateral & financing across USD, stablecoins, and liquid RWAs (e.g., T-bill wrappers), balancing yield, haircuts, and liquidity.

• Define strategy parameters and risk inputs for delta-neutral vaults on decentralized infrastructure, turning internal strategies into on-chain products with defined risk/return profiles.

• Work with engineering to specify vault logic, allocation rules, rebalancing cadence, fee structures, and risk limits; ensure robust implementations.

• Monitor vault health end-to-end: TVL, utilization, yield vs targets, model deviations, and interactions between on-chain and off-chain hedging.

• Establish and maintain controls: real-time delta tracking, margin buffers, kill switches, circuit breakers, and alerting for 24/7 markets.

• Quantify performance: daily PnL (carry/funding, costs, slippage), stress tests, capacity analysis, and vault-level risk reporting.

• Coordinate with engineering, risk, operations, legal/compliance, custody/prime partners, and vault infrastructure partners; maintain documented runbooks and audit-ready processes.

• Continuously refine execution models, collateral routing, data-driven sizing, and vault designs to improve net capture after frictions and fees.

Core Qualifications

• Proven derivatives PM/trader with 3–5+ years running cash & carry / basis / funding capture in crypto or a related role in TradFi.

• Demonstrated PnL attribution for a delta-neutral book and a clear risk framework with limits, scenarios, drawdown controls.

• Crypto market-microstructure fluency: perps funding mechanics, futures rolls, cross-venue liquidity, margin models, ADL/clawback risks, and exchange operational quirks.

• Execution + data tooling: hands-on Python for analysis and automation; comfort with exchange APIs/WebSockets/FIX; building dashboards/alerts.

• Operational discipline: reconciliations, NAV/PnL checks, custody/wallet operations, counterparty underwriting, incident management, and documentation.

• Communication & leadership: crisp writing, structured thinking, and the ability to drive decisions across risk, engineering, and operations.

• Comfort operating at the intersection of CeFi and DeFi, routing capital between centralized venues and on-chain vaults, understanding risk and operational implications of both.

Nice to Have

• Experience integrating staked ETH yield into basis construction and managing associated liquidity/discount risks.

• Prior work designing or managing vault strategies on DeFi infrastructure, including strategy specifications, parameter tuning, and on-chain risk monitoring.

• Prior work with tokenized funds or multi-chain issuance registries.

• Relationships with regulated primes/custodians and history launching institutional-grade strategies.

Benefits / Offer

• An opportunity to push the frontier of on-chain capital markets with institutional partners and to scale delta-neutral strategies to >$1bn in managed assets.

• Competitive compensation including salary, equity, token, and carry.

• High-ownership environment with direct impact on product roadmap and commercialization.

• Remote-first culture with bases in NYC, Miami, and Central Europe and opportunities for travel to team events and conferences.

• A culture that blends rigorous risk management with fast, thoughtful execution