Principal Product Manager

Responsibilities

Digital Asset is hiring a Principal Product Manager to own the long-term product strategy for Splice, one of our core open-source contributions to Canton Network.

Splice forms the public operating layer of Canton, including the Canton Coin application, the network’s tokenomics, fees, and incentives, the Canton Name Service (CNS), and network governance mechanisms. These components determine how the network functions economically, how participants are incentivized, and how change is introduced over time.

A successful candidate in this role will provide strong evidence of their ability to analyze ambiguous situations, make sound decisions with imperfect information, hold themselves accountable for making good judgement calls.

The role is not primarily focused on execution management or feature delivery, but rather on analysis and decision making. You will be expected to exercise independent judgment on matters that materially affect the network’s technical and economic trajectory, in collaboration with a diverse set of stakeholders including node and infrastructure operators, application providers, and the Canton Foundation.

You will work as a close partner to the core engineering team that has built, and operated nodes in, Canton’s public network infrastructure over multiple years.

• Own the Strategic Direction of Digital Asset’s Contributions to Splice

  • You’ll define, defend, and evolve the roadmap for Digital Asset’s contributions to Splice, while engaging with and responding to the interests of a wide range of stakeholders in the Splice contributor base and in the Canton Network as a whole. You are accountable for prioritization decisions and for the quality of reasoning behind them.

• Make Hard Trade-Offs Explicit

  • Use structured analysis, modeling, and first-principles reasoning to evaluate protocol changes, incentive mechanisms, and governance proposals. You will be expected to articulate why certain paths are chosen—and others are not.

• Operate at the Ecosystem Level

  • Align the interests of the Canton Foundation, application providers, validators, and internal stakeholders into a coherent product direction, even when incentives are misaligned.

• Lead Through Expertise

  • Guide development across a distributed open-source contributor base. Influence is earned through clarity, technical credibility, and sound judgment.

• Communicate for Decision-Makers

  • Produce clear, written artifacts that explain complex technical and economic issues to senior engineers, executives, external partners, and governance bodies.

• Anticipate Long-Horizon Risk

  • Work with architects to identify long-horizon risks in distributed systems design and protocol economics, and ensure they are addressed before becoming constraints on network growth. 

• Adapt and Optimize
  • Regularly adjust and reprioritize work to get the most useful results with minimal engineering effort. Regularly work with engineers to remove scope and adjust designs to focus on the essence of each problem and avoid unnecessary work. 

Requirements

This role requires deep experience. Candidates should expect interviews that probe their reasoning and strategic decisions on similar projects. 

• 10+ years of product management experience, including ownership of strategy for complex, long-lived platforms.

• Demonstrated depth in distributed systems, Web3, or financial infrastructure, including BFT consensus, incentive mechanisms, and transaction lifecycles.

• Proven effectiveness in open-source or multi-stakeholder environments where formal authority is limited.

• Experience partnering with senior engineers and architects on foundational system design.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English

• Formal background in computer science or software engineering.

• Direct experience with Daml, Canton, or comparable protocol-level systems.

• Experience designing or evaluating incentive mechanisms or governance models.

Based in New York City or Zurich. Limited international travel (2–4 weeks per year).

Benefits