Head of Risk

Overview

• About the opportunity
• We're building a new proprietary trading firm focused on CFDs, futures, and crypto markets.
• We are pre-launch — which means the rulebook, the evaluation model, the platform stack, and the risk framework are all still on the whiteboard.
• We want them designed by someone who has watched a prop firm scale, scramble, and survive.
• This is not a role where you inherit dashboards and SOPs.
• You build them.
• If you've ever sat in a risk meeting at an existing prop firm and thought
• *"if I were starting one from scratch, I'd do this completely differently"*
• — that's the conversation we want to have.
• What you'll own
• **The challenge / evaluation model.**
• Profit targets, drawdown rules, time limits, consistency rules, news-trading constraints — every parameter that defines who passes and who doesn't.
• You decide the math, we pressure-test it together.
• **Live trader risk framework.**
• Daily loss limits, max positions, instrument restrictions, leverage tiers, scaling plans.
• The rules that keep funded traders profitable for the firm without killing the experience.
• **A-book vs B-book strategy.**
• Which trader profiles get internalized, which get offloaded, what the hedging policy looks like, how we manage exposure across correlated instruments.
• **Anomaly and abuse detection.**
• EA abuse, news straddling, copy-trading rings, latency arbitrage, hedged accounts across sub-firms, KYC fraud patterns.
• Both the playbook and (eventually) the tooling.
• **LP and execution risk.**
• Slippage thresholds, rejection rates, fill quality monitoring, broker relationships.
• Knowing when to push back on an LP and when to switch.
• **Risk reporting that the CEO and board actually read.**
• Daily P&L attribution, cohort burn rates, leading indicators for blow-up clusters.
• Who you are
• **5+ years inside a prop firm, broker, or HFT/market-making shop**
• in a risk, trading, or quantitative ops capacity.
• The brand on your CV matters less than the depth of what you actually owned.
• **You can talk fluently about drawdown design tradeoffs**
• — trailing vs static, daily vs overall, equity vs balance — and have opinions on which combinations create perverse trader behavior.
• **You've watched cohorts blow up**
• and can describe in detail why it happened and what changed afterward.
• Pattern recognition is everything in this role.
• **You understand CFD and futures market microstructure**
• — not just the products, but how liquidity, slippage, and execution actually work for retail-facing flow.
• **You're comfortable working without a team for the first 6 months.**
• You'll be the first risk hire.
• You build the function, then hire under you.
• **You can write SQL or pull data yourself.**
• You don't wait on a BI analyst to answer questions about trader behavior.
• Bonus points
• Direct experience designing evaluation models at firms like FTMO, MyForexFunds, FundedNext, The5%ers, Topstep, Apex, or similar
• Background in algorithmic trading, market-making, or quant research
• Familiarity with the MENA, SEA, or LatAm retail trading landscape
• Experience navigating UAE / DFSA / VARA regulatory frameworks
• You've built or evaluated risk tooling — in-house dashboards, third-party platforms, or both
• What we offer
• **A genuine founder-level seat.**
• Not a "Head of" title with a Director's mandate.
• You shape the firm.
• **Equity / profit-share**
• structure designed for someone taking real upside in the build.
• **Dubai relocation support**
• if needed, or hybrid setup for the right person already in-region.
• **Direct line to the CEO and the cap table.**
• No middle management to filter your decisions.