Head Of Market Making Operations
We are working with a fast-growing international technology business to appoint a Head of Market Making Operations for a Predictions Market Platform
This is a hands-on leadership role sitting at the intersection of market making, trading operations and risk management.
The business operates automated market-making strategies at scale. Your responsibility will be to ensure those systems are performing as expected, identify problems quickly when they are not, and make the right decisions to protect the business from unnecessary market or execution risk.
This is not simply a monitoring role.
The successful candidate will be expected to understand what the market-making systems are doing, recognise abnormal behaviour, intervene when necessary and help continuously improve how the wider operation functions.
Over time, you will play a major role in developing the market-making operation, its processes and the team around it.
The role
You will take day-to-day responsibility for overseeing market-making operations and ensuring automated strategies are behaving correctly across live markets.
A major part of the role is judgement under pressure.
When markets behave unexpectedly, algorithms fail, liquidity changes or exposures move outside expected parameters, you need to be able to understand what is happening, assess the risk and take appropriate action.
That could involve adjusting strategy parameters, reducing exposure, escalating technical issues or manually trading/hedging positions where necessary.
You will also be expected to look beyond individual incidents and identify ways to make the overall operation more resilient, efficient and scalable.
Key responsibilities
- Monitor automated market-making strategies and live market exposures.
- Identify unusual behaviour, execution issues or emerging risk quickly.
- Make informed decisions when market-making systems are not behaving as expected.
- Intervene manually where necessary to reduce or hedge risk.
- Work closely with trading, quantitative and engineering teams to investigate issues.
- Understand the relationship between market behaviour, pricing, liquidity and exposure.
- Develop and improve operational processes, controls and escalation procedures.
- Analyse incidents and identify how systems or processes can be improved.
- Help improve monitoring, tooling and visibility across the market-making operation.
- Provide leadership and direction to the Romania-based operations team.
- Develop junior operators and help build stronger decision-making capability within the team.
- Contribute to the longer-term development of the firm's market-making infrastructure and operating model.
What we are looking for
We are open-minded about the exact background of the person coming into the role.
Relevant experience could come from:
- Prediction markets
- Sportsbook / sports trading
- Electronic market making
- Proprietary trading
- Trading or hedging operations
- Market risk / trading risk
- Liquidity or execution management
- TradFi trading environments
The strongest candidates will have experience operating in environments where automated systems manage significant volumes or financial exposure and where human judgement is required when something goes wrong.
You should be comfortable making decisions with incomplete information and understand the consequences of allowing risk to build unchecked.
Ideal experience
We would particularly value someone who has:
- Experience monitoring automated trading, pricing or market-making systems.
- A strong understanding of exposure, hedging and market risk.
- Experience managing risk in real-time.
- Confidence making trading or operational decisions during abnormal market conditions.
- Experience manually trading or hedging positions when required.
- Strong analytical and numerical judgement.
- The ability to understand complex systems rather than simply follow predefined procedures.
- Experience improving operational controls, processes or trading systems.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to work closely with technical and quantitative teams.
Previous leadership experience would be highly valuable, although it is not essential.
We would also consider a strong market-making, trading or risk operator who has not yet formally led a team but demonstrates the judgement, ownership and potential to step into a leadership position.
The person
This role will suit someone who naturally takes ownership.
You are likely to be calm when markets become volatile, comfortable challenging assumptions and capable of making decisions where there is no obvious answer.
You should also be curious about how the entire system works.
Rather than simply reacting when something breaks, we want someone who asks why it happened, how it can be prevented and what can be improved.
The long-term opportunity is to help shape and professionalise a growing market-making operation, not simply operate the systems that already exist.
Location
Romania (Full Relocation Package on offer or Regular Travel required)
The role will lead the company's market-making operations team based in Romania.