Senior Product Manager - Aqua Protocol

About 1inch and Aqua

1inch is a decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem dedicated to promoting financial independence by enabling users and developers to trade, hold, and monitor digital assets with robust security and intuitive interfaces. Its protocols and APIs provide fundamental infrastructure across the DeFi landscape and beyond.

Aqua is 1inch's shared liquidity protocol that allows liquidity providers to operate directly from their wallets using on-chain market-making strategies, while liquidity takers access this liquidity via 1inch’s routing and decentralized application (dApp).

Role Overview

As the Senior Product Manager of Aqua, you will be fully responsible for the product's vision, strategy, roadmap, and overarching business outcomes. You will steer the product direction, ensuring that every development maximizes customer value, enhances competitive advantage, and fosters sustainable business growth.

Key responsibilities

• Maintain ownership of Aqua’s long-term business success, crafting its vision, strategy, positioning, value proposition, and multi-year roadmap.
• Manage a structured product portfolio with prioritized initiatives, clear objectives, and measurable success indicators aligned with broader company goals.
• Analyze and prioritize roadmap investments by balancing customer benefits, financial returns, engineering constraints, technical feasibility, and associated risks.
• Lead product discovery efforts through user research, hypothesis testing, experimentation, and learning from measurable data.
• Construct and advocate for investment cases grounded in opportunity sizing, on-chain analytics, competitive comparisons, and cost-benefit evaluations.
• Define meaningful product key performance indicators (KPIs) and assess whether product initiatives achieve intended business results.
• Leverage approved AI tools to support strategic analysis, market research, discovery, and documentation, ensuring output validation and decision accountability.
• Monitor competitor activity, regulatory shifts, macroeconomic trends, and technological advances to inform product roadmap modifications.
• Evaluate risks related to smart contracts, protocols, liquidity, operations, financial markets, and security prior to major product decisions.
• Align cross-functional teams on Aqua’s vision, and communicate priorities, compromises, risks, and product performance effectively across technical and executive stakeholders.

Candidate Profile

• Possesses at least six years of product management experience with complex technology products, adept at defining strategy and realizing long-term business goals.
• Exhibits exceptional, hands-on expertise in DeFi, including critical use and evaluation of DeFi protocols.
• Understands automated market maker (AMM) and request-for-quote (RFQ) mechanism trade-offs, MEV concepts, solver/resolver economics, and intent-based execution architectures.
• Has deep knowledge of liquidity aggregation, provisioning, market microstructure, execution quality, and economic models in both decentralized and centralized contexts.
• Familiar with solver networks, intent mechanisms, cross-chain executions, and advanced routing designs.
• Understands smart contract security, operational resilience, protocol risks, and security design principles.
• Proven track record leading structured product discovery, business case formulation, and presenting product investments to executives.
• Strong analytical capabilities and communication skills, able to translate complex technical, business, and customer insights into clear decisions for diverse audiences.
• Experience using AI tools in product research, analysis, decision-making, and delivery, with ability to verify AI results while holding decision responsibility.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background building liquidity aggregation, trading, execution, exchange, or blockchain infrastructure products.
• Experience in quantitative finance, market making, or electronic trading systems.
• Direct work with protocol researchers, smart contract developers, or blockchain security experts.
• MBA or advanced degree in Finance, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Scrum certification.

Equal Opportunity Statement

1inch is an equal opportunity employer committed to assessing candidates solely based on skills, experience, and potential irrespective of race, gender, age, ethnicity, disability, or other characteristics. Diversity is valued as it strengthens product development.

Recruitment Process and AI Usage

AI-assisted tools are employed to efficiently process applications. These tools aid the recruitment team without making final hiring decisions. Each application is reviewed by a human, with no decision made solely on automated processing. For detailed information regarding AI use and candidate rights, please refer to the company's privacy notice.