Product Manager

Job Description: Product Manager

Company: Initiativ

Position: Product Manager

Management: Reports to Product Lead and Founders

Location: Paris 9e, France (hybrid/remote possible)

Start: as soon as possible

Contract: CDI (permanent, full-time)

Compensation: Base salary + Equity

Modern trading for commodities markets. Initiativ (InEx) is building an exchange for the commodities of today and tomorrow, purpose-built on digital settlement rails to replace legacy models largely unchanged since 2005. The platform enables spot and derivatives trading for corporate end-users who currently trade through intermediaries, and lowers fees and optimises collateral for institutional traders. Together, these two structural inefficiencies - intermediation and inefficient collateral use - represent an estimated €150 billion opportunity.

We are looking for a Product Manager to bring innovation, accuracy and structure to how we build: turning market and client insight into a clear roadmap as we move from licensing to live trading, then scaling the platform across new markets and client segments, alongside our Product Lead and a lean engineering team.

Key Responsibilities

● Product process & organisation: designing and running the product development process, covering how ideas are captured, evaluated, decided and communicated; aggregating and integrating insights from different channels into the product development process.

● Market model & UX/UI: translating market model features (e.g. order types, matching rules, trading session specifications, pre-trade controls, fees and reference data) into intuitive, fluid and precise UX/UI flows. You'll challenge how trading interfaces have traditionally been designed, prototype and refine new approaches to minimize friction in the user journey.

● Product front-end: owning front-end design end-to-end, drawing on the best of fintech practices to improve the standard for institutional trading interfaces, in coordination with our Product Lead, the engineering team, and our external designer.

● Forward-deployed mindset: proactive hands-on collaboration with engineering team in fast cycles to plan, refine, and ship PRDs from ideation to production, ensuring product components are shipped reliably.

● Compliance by design: translating regulatory requirements into product features, working with compliance, legal counsel and our clearing partners.

Context

● Regulatory context: MTF platform under pending AMF authorization. Professional clients only (MiFID II). Markets: EU Emission Allowances (EUAs) under the EU ETS, expanding to broader energy commodities.

● Technical: hybrid architecture built by a lean in-house team; a high-performance matching layer with post-trade settlement living on a decentralized institutional public blockchain, integrated with our CCP.

Profile Sought

● Experience: 5–7 years in product management, including at least 2 years on B2B or institutional products at an exchange / MTF, broker, bank, trading platform or fintech. Experience shaping UX/UI for product. Proven track record taking products from concept to launch.

● Process proficiency: we seek someone with strong process organization skills to design, optimize and run structured workflows, maintaining order via clear ownership and strong communication skills in written specifications.

● Market knowledge: solid understanding of trading workflows and market structure (order books, matching, clearing & settlement, margin and collateral).

● Regulatory literacy: comfortable in a regulated environment (MiFID II / MiFIR, MAR) and able to turn regulatory requirements into precise and actionable product specifications.

● Technical fluency: comfortable discussing APIs, data models and architecture with engineers; Interest in blockchain, tokenization and digital settlement.

● Languages: Native or Bilingual English.

● Mindset: team spirit; you are thorough and detail-oriented, are an innovative thinker and have a curiosity about market infrastructure with strong ownership of your tasks.

What We Offer

● Front-row seat at a fast-growing fintech replacing a €1 trillion legacy market with a next-generation solution.

● Real ownership: the freedom to shape how professionals trade on a platform built from scratch, with substantial growth opportunities as the business scales.

● Competitive package, Paris 9e office, hybrid or remote under consideration.