VP, Product at PEAK6 in Chicago

VP, Product

Location: Chicago

WHO WE ARE

PEAK6 Capital Management is a proprietary options trading firm that has been defining the industry for more than 25 years. While many firms have come and gone, PEAK6 Capital Management has consistently delivered liquidity to the options market. We thrive due to our firm’s special blend of financial acumen, ability to manage risk, and cutting-edge technology.

Our success is driven by our team of technologists, engineers, and traders who leverage proprietary tech and a data-centric approach to maintain inventory and stay ahead of the markets, so customers can, too.

ABOUT THIS ROLE

The VP, Product owns the product roadmap for PEAK6 Capital Management and is accountable for what it delivers: the platforms, tools, and, more and more, the AI agents our trading desk relies on every day. Our traders work in fast-moving markets. They expect products that are fast, reliable, and built to give them an edge. We obsess over adoption, and we measure success by the performance and efficiency gains our products create, not by features shipped.

We are moving from software that traders operate to systems that work alongside them. These are agents that watch markets and positions, surface ideas with context, prepare trades, handle the operational follow-through, and learn from outcomes, while people stay in control of the decisions that matter. This role leads that shift. You will decide where agents earn autonomy, where humans stay in the loop, and how trust is built, measured, and expanded over time. You will also run the product team as an agent-native organization, where research, prototypes, and specs that used to take weeks now take days.

Our ideal candidate is a curious, opinionated product leader who takes risks and makes the call when the answer is not obvious. They form strong views, back them with data, and keep things moving. They treat the roadmap as a portfolio of bets and experiments rather than a queue of requests. They lead a lean team, stay close enough to the work to roll up their sleeves, and get their energy from building rather than maintaining.

This role is built to grow. You start by running product and building systems for Capital Management. As the model proves out, your scope expands across PEAK6, with direct or dotted-line leadership of product across other PEAK6 businesses. You will bring the agentic playbook built here to the rest of the firm.

This role reports to the CTO and can be based in our Chicago, New York City, or Austin offices, with a preference for Chicago.

What you’ll do:

Set direction and own the call

• Own the product vision and roadmap for the trading desk, and tie every major bet to a measurable outcome in trader performance, efficiency, or risk.
• Decide what gets built, what waits, and what stops, and own the result. Balance a demanding group of stakeholders without becoming an order taker.
• Run the roadmap as a set of experiments: name the hypothesis, test the riskiest assumption first, and scale or kill based on evidence.

Build agentic products

• Define and ship agents that monitor markets and positions, surface ideas, stage orders, and automate follow-through across OMS, EMS, and risk platforms.
• Set the autonomy model: where agents act on their own, where they recommend, where a trader confirms, and what evidence it takes to give a workflow more autonomy.
• Design trust into the product: evaluations, guardrails, audit trails, explainability, and clean handoffs between agents and people, in partnership with Risk and Compliance.
• Find and remove manual touchpoints across the trade lifecycle, choosing between a process change, an agent, buy or partner, or a new build.

Run an agent-native product team

• Build a team that works agent-first, using AI to speed up discovery, prototyping, requirements, testing, and analysis so ideas reach traders in days, not quarters.
• Partner with Engineering across the full lifecycle, from initiation and build/buy/partner analysis through design, testing, release, and adoption. Step in directly on requirements, testing, and release when the team needs it.
• Lead, coach, and develop a lean team of product managers with clear goals, fast feedback, and high standards, and grow the next generation of product leaders at the firm.

Scale across PEAK6

• Build a product operating model and agentic playbook that can be carried into other PEAK6 businesses.
• Over time, take on broader PEAK6 product leadership, including direct or dotted-line oversight of smaller businesses, and share platforms, patterns, and lessons across the group.

YOUR EXPERIENCE

• 7 or more years in product management, including at least several years as product lead and owning a roadmap end to end.
• A track record of shipping products that users adopted and that moved a measurable business outcome, not only products that launched.
• Strong opinions, held with evidence. You can explain why something should or should not be built, defend it under pushback, and change your mind when the data says to.
• Vision and detail at the same time. You can describe where a product should be in two to three years, then write the requirements and test the release that gets it there.
• Hands-on fluency with AI and agents. You use them every day in your own work, and you have built or shipped products where AI does real work instead of sitting on top as a feature.
• Sound judgment on autonomy and trust. You know how to evaluate agent performance, design human-in-the-loop controls, and expand autonomy as the evidence builds.
• Credibility with expert users. You can talk their language, earn their trust, and push back when a request is not the right answer.
• Enough technical depth to partner closely with engineering on architecture, data, and integration tradeoffs, and to know when a shortcut will become a real problem later.
• Comfort with pace and ambiguity. You move quickly, run several high-stakes efforts at once, and stay effective when priorities shift.
• A builder's instinct and the discipline of an operator. You get energy from creating new products, and you still put in place the process, cadence, and transparency a team needs to deliver reliably.
• Ideally experience working in a regulated environment alongside Risk, Compliance, and Legal, and treating them as design partners rather than blockers.
• Ideally trading or financial markets experience, ideally options, OMS, EMS, or risk systems. You also have a view on how these workflows should look in the future, not only how they have always worked.
• The ambition and range to grow past a single business, with an interest in leading product across a group of businesses.

Mindset You Bring:

• You take risk and make decisions with incomplete information, and you own the outcome
• You have opinions, you share them, and you can be persuaded by better data
• You get your hands dirty and move things forward instead of waiting for perfect clarity
• You understand product and its value: you treat internal users as customers and care whether they adopt and benefit from what you ship
• You keep a good attitude under pressure, high feedback volume, and stakeholder dissatisfaction, and you work through it constructively

OUR REWARDS

We offer a robust package of employee perks and benefits, including healthcare benefits (medical, dental and vision, EAP), competitive PTO, 401k match, parental leave, and HSA contribution match. We also provide our employees with a paid subscription to the Calm app and offer generous external learning and tuition reimbursement benefits. As a hybrid workforce, we offer our employees the ability to work remotely up to two days a week.

Base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and office location. This position also may be eligible for a discretionary annual bonus in addition to a range of health & wellness benefits, enhancing your overall compensation package.

Base Salary Range

$230,720-$288,400

PEAK6 is proud to be an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, or any other protected characteristic. Our hiring practices ensure that all qualified applicants receive fair consideration without regard to these characteristics.

PEAK6 is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible workplace for all candidates, including those with disabilities. We are dedicated to ensuring equal employment opportunities and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. If you require reasonable accommodations to participate in the application or interview process, please contact our HR department at hr@peak6.com. We will work with you to provide the necessary accommodations to ensure your full participation in our hiring process.

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