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.

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.

• 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, stable coins, 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.

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

• 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/Web Sockets/FIX; building dashboards/alerts.

• Operational discipline
  : reconciliations, NAV/PnL checks, custody/wallet operations, counter party 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 De Fi , routing capital between centralized venues and on-chain vaults, understanding risk and operational implications of both.

• 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.

• 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