Trade Systems Lead

The Opportunity

As Trade Systems Lead at Nascent, you’ll take full ownership of the systems that support, orchestrate, and scale our trading operation—from strategy configuration and controls to workflows, tooling, and integration points across research, trading, and platform. You will not be expected to be a domain expert in market microstructure or exchange-level execution. You will be expected to lead a team to build resilient systems that let our traders and researchers move fast, safely, and with leverage.

This is a senior role with real leadership weight. You’ll lead a team, set direction, and run complex projects end-to-end—while staying close enough to the code to unblock hard problems and model what “good” looks like. You’ll partner tightly with traders, researchers, and platform leads, bringing order to ambiguity and turning intent into shipped systems.

We’re looking for an AI-native, agentic engineer: someone who instinctively uses LLMs and modern tooling to accelerate design, planning, debugging, and delivery—and teaches their team to do the same. You create leverage through systems, people, and tools.

What You’ll Do

• Own the trade systems domain: Take end-to-end ownership of the systems that power our trading workflows—designing, building, and evolving internal tools and infrastructure that sit around execution, not inside exchange microstructure.
• Lead and scale a team: Act as a true people leader: set direction, coach performance, run planning, and create clarity.
• Drive execution through chaos: Turn messy, high-stakes ideas into shipped systems. You plan work, sequence delivery, manage dependencies, and keep momentum without hiding behind process.
• Partner with senior stakeholders: Work directly with trading, research, and platform leads. You translate business needs into system design, make tradeoffs explicit, and keep everyone aligned as things change.
• Build with an AI-first mindset: Use LLMs and agentic workflows to move faster—across design docs, implementation, debugging, and project management. You raise the bar for how the team builds.
• Architect for reliability and scale: Design systems that are observable, resilient, and adaptable as strategies, venues, and team size evolve.
• Set the standard: Shape how this team plans, builds, reviews, and ships. You define what “great” looks like—technically and operationally.

About You

• You are a strong people leader who has run teams through real delivery—setting priorities, giving feedback, and holding a high bar.
• You are a systems thinker, comfortable owning complex internal platforms even if you’re not the world’s expert in the underlying domain.
• You thrive in ambiguity and bring structure through action, not decks.
• You have real project management instincts: sequencing work, managing risk, and keeping stakeholders aligned.
• You are AI-native and scrappy—you default to leverage, automation, and modern tools instead of brute force.
• You value ownership over consensus and clarity over ceremony.

Experience That Helps (But Isn’t Dogma)

• Leading engineering teams that build internal platforms or mission-critical systems
• Owning systems adjacent to trading, finance, or high-reliability operations
• Experience designing workflows, controls, or orchestration layers—not just low-level execution
• Strong backend or systems engineering background (language and stack are less important than judgment)

Deep expertise in trade execution systems is not required. Curiosity, learning speed, and ownership are.

Nice to Have’s

• Demonstrated ability to manage senior cross-functional stakeholders and drive alignment across technical and business teams
• Experience working in crypto, DeFi, or high-frequency trading environments
• Ideally based within ±3 hours of EST

About Nascent

Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We’ve backed 100+ early-stage teams that we believe can change markets and expand what’s possible. At Nascent, we combine venture + market pedigree with product-grade engineering to turn research into revenue: experiments that ship fast, are evaluated rigorously, and move P&L. We focus on models, low-latency infrastructure, and resilient systems that compound performance over time.

Our Team & Culture

At Nascent, we are an interdisciplinary team of investors, builders & creators, capable of achieving more together than we can as individuals. We offer the opportunity to contribute to building the future global economic system with a world-class team and culture that pairs the freedom to explore, experiment & play with a competitive drive to win. We invest in our people by providing the autonomy to build, coupled with accountability & honest feedback to help learn, grow, perform & win. We’re a fully distributed team that understands the value of in-person time—we host a team retreat each year and encourage team members to come together for more frequent in-person work.

Principles that drive our team & work

• Compete to win
• Explore, experiment, play
• Always be building
• Seek and speak truth
• Own your shit

What We Offer

At Nascent, we offer a competitive total compensation package heavily weighted toward bonus, ensuring that when we perform at our best and the firm wins we all win.

• The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment
• Remote and distributed working environment
• Comprehensive health benefits package including dental, vision, and life
• 16 weeks fully paid parental leave & supported return to work
• Home office setup and stipend or coworking space and wellness stipend
• Retirement plan matching contributions
• Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location
• Team activities and in-person team retreats

We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity and differences of perspectives. We do not discriminate on the basis of any status, inclusive of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.