Product Manager, DeFi & DAO

About Acala

Acala’s mission is to build and nurture the autonomous financial infrastructure of the decentralized web. Delivering on this mission will bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system.

Our core project is the Acala Network itself, which we expect to become the de facto DeFi parachain and stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot provides the underlying trust primitives to our parachain, upon which we’ve built our suite of financial primitives including; decentralized, multi-collateral stablecoin; trustless staking derivatives, and Decentralized Exchange. These primitives will be used by us and other teams to power open DeFi innovations, and remove the need for the intermediaries that inhabit almost every conventional trust-based financial system.

We have secured our support from eminent backers like Polychain, Coinbase Venture, Pantera and many more. Acala has just began its launch process on December 18, 2021, so there’s no better time to join our mission and be a part of the future that we’re building.

About the role

As a Product Manager at Acala your goal will be to keep our team focused on building what our growing network of DeFi customers wants. It sounds easy.

Examples of Products that you could work on include:

• Acala dApps, our DeFi suite for swapping, staking and earning on Polkadot
• Karura dApps, a sister suite for similar DeFi activities on Kusama
• AquaDAO, Acala’s upcoming decentralised Treasury Reserve protocol

This is an end-to-end Product Management role for an experienced leader in commercial software products, but it also requires an in-depth knowledge of DeFi application practices and the common pitfalls they succumb to. In other words you’ll be taking Software Products from conception to launch, but if you’re not already an advanced DeFi user then you may find the learning curve quite steep. Beware.

You won’t be alone. You’ll be brainstorming blockchain possibilities in a team with Lawrence & Alex, as well as the Acala founders and our Engineering Team of 20+. But you’ll need to balance data-driven decisions with the technical demands of an Engineering liaison, while keeping an eye on ever-changing User Experience requirements and igniting ad-hoc UX projects as you see fit.

Our ideal candidate will be an advanced DeFi user and an experienced web-based Product Manager who has already spent some time working on blockchain applications, whether commercially successful or not. At minimum we need a code-fluent Product Manager with a mature interest in decentralised applications and the general concept behind blockchain applications.

Full Time | Contract | Competitive Salary | Remote APAC

What you’ll do

• Roadmap; define & own Product goals with Acala’s founders
• User Research; design & execute with our User Ops team
• Software Requirements; from tech specs to test cases
• Dev Liaison; steer workflows & wireframes with our Engineering team
• Launch plans; co-ordinate with our Community & Growth team
• UI Enhancements; workshops with our Design Team
• External; Occasional ad-hoc projects with other ecosystem teams

What it takes

• Commercial Software Product Management experience, 3 years minimum
• Passion for working with innovative Software Developers [<– 50% of the job]
• Expert level knowledge of DeFi use cases, DAOs, LP/MM dynamics, etc
• A Demonstrable methodology for increasing efficiency across teams
• Software Engineering background beneficial; you will regularly evaluate the technological strengths and weakness of 3rd party solutions
• Alignment with our core values: Empowerment, Support & Community

What we offer

• Competitive contract-based compensation (you’ll have to invoice us from wherever you are)
• Flexible working hours within Pacific timezones
• Collaborative, transparent and empowering work culture
• Meaningful work on creating better technologies for a fairer future
• Opportunity to work in a multinational, high-performance team with diverse backgrounds

NB: For more information on this position, our employment conditions, or anything related to working for Acala, get in touch with our Talent Manager: [email protected]

Our Team

With approximately 50 full-time team members working across 8 different countries, our team is truly decentralised. We’re some of the leading blockchain innovators, Substrate & Rust engineers, full-stack dApp developers, & Economist Analysts. But we’re just people like you, working from our shared desire for a fairer and more inclusive financial system, in direct contrast to the clear shortcomings of the current institutions that run our world.

Our Values

The community we’re building is shaped by our values and fuelled by the needs of all humans:

• Inclusion, Care, Trust, and Respect
• Empowerment
• Guidance and Support
• Friendship, Community, Real Relationships

We’re building Acala based on a core set of values we believe are in line with the tenets of web3:

• True decentralisation
• Less Trust, More Truth
• Integrity
• Accountability
• Empowering individuals with more autonomy

What We Have Achieved

Acala was founded in 2019 as an early Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and is an ecosystem and education partner of both the W3F and Polkadot. Throughout 2021 we have proven ourselves to be the DeFi hub(s) of the Polkadot Ecosystem & Community by securing the first crowdloan-funded parachain slots on both the Polkadot & Kusama blockchain networks. But even at this, our true work has only just begun..