Lead Product Manager, DeFi

Your mission

Bitpanda serves millions of investors across Europe, and we're bringing regulated finance onchain with Vision Chain, our own OP Stack L2 blockchain. We are looking for a Lead Product Manager, DeFi to build Bitpanda’s DeFi ecosystem from the ground up, creating the world’s premier Euro-denominated DeFi ecosystem while making it safe, accessible, and intuitive for our customers. 

The first use case is crypto-backed borrowing and lending in the Bitpanda app, with an eye to then build more sophisticated products and use cases leveraging tokenized commodities, securities, funds, and structured products. You’ll decide which protocols and partners come to Vision Chain, and work collaboratively to bring DeFi to Bitpanda customers in a way that feels as simple as the app they already trust. You'll work in a small, senior team with our smart contract engineers and Bitpanda's Legal, Compliance and Risk teams, as an individual contributor reporting to the Head of Web3 Product.

What you’ll do 

• Design and run the lending markets: set loan-to-value and liquidation thresholds, interest rate curves, caps, and oracles, while also owning monitoring and incident playbooks.
• Bring liquidity and users to permissioned markets and assets: set supply targets, bring in euro liquidity from stablecoin issuers, institutional lenders, curated vaults and market makers, and work out how verified customers reach these markets, without paying for volume.
• Make sure the right DeFi infrastructure is in place, particularly for permissioned tokenized assets: DEX liquidity deep enough for swaps and liquidations, liquidators, oracles and the other building blocks the markets depend on.
• Shape what customers see, sign, and own in the Bitpanda app, including how liquidation and risk are explained, and measure real use: borrowers who come back, bad debt and revenue, not total value locked alone.
• Recommend which protocols and partners come to Vision Chain, backed by a business case, and work with Legal, Compliance and Risk from day one on EU consumer credit rules and MiCA.

Who you are 

• 6+ years of Product Management experience, with at least 3+ years focused specifically on building and scaling DeFi or crypto products.
• You know lending markets in depth: collateral and liquidation mechanics, interest rate models, oracles and how they fail, curation and bad debt. You're at home with the EVM and can read Solidity smart contract code well enough to question engineers about it.
• Demonstrated experience bringing DeFi applications into regulated consumer products and successfully bridging the gap between decentralized and centralized finance.
• Ability to lead through influence, build clear business cases, and write excellent documentation in English. This includes a strong working knowledge of EU crypto regulations (e.g., MiCA) to effectively partner with Risk, Legal, and Compliance teams.
• Nice to haves: 
• hands-on experience scaling onchain ecosystem liquidity from scratch
• knowledge of and/or work experience in traditional financial markets

** This position is available remotely in the EU.