What is a Project Manager at AKUNA CAPITAL?

As a Project Manager at AKUNA CAPITAL, you are the critical engine that drives execution within an innovative, fast-paced trading environment. Akuna is a premier options market-maker, relying heavily on cutting-edge, low-latency technologies, data-driven solutions, and mathematical models to provide competitive liquidity. In this role, you are not just a schedule-keeper; you are a strategic enabler who bridges the gap between complex technical requirements and tangible business outcomes.

Your impact will be felt directly across the Trading, Operations, and Engineering teams. By overseeing multiple concurrent projects, you will streamline workflows, automate redundant processes, and allow our engineers to focus squarely on execution. You will hold highly technical teams accountable to their commitments while proactively identifying risks before they threaten project timelines.

This role requires a unique blend of technical fluency and relentless drive. You will be diving headfirst into the mechanics of software development and trading infrastructure, making sense of competing priorities, and presenting clear, actionable updates to senior executives. If you thrive on creating order out of ambiguity and building processes from the ground up, this position offers the scale and complexity to truly test your leadership.

Common Interview Questions

When interviewing for the Project Manager role, expect questions that test your practical experience rather than textbook theory. The following questions represent the patterns and themes frequently encountered by candidates at AKUNA CAPITAL. Use these to guide your preparation, focusing on structuring your answers using the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method.

Agile Execution and Process Engineering

These questions test your ability to manage the project lifecycle, utilize core tools, and build efficiency into team workflows.

• How do you typically set up a Jira board for a newly formed engineering team?
• Tell me about a time you had to build a project management process from scratch. What steps did you take?
• Describe a situation where you recognized a team's workflow was inefficient. How did you streamline it?
• How do you ensure that Agile ceremonies (like stand-ups or retrospectives) remain productive and don't just become status updates?
• Walk me through your process for proactively identifying and mitigating project risks.

Technical Fluency and Problem Solving

These questions evaluate your comfort level working alongside highly technical teams and your ability to grasp complex concepts.

• Tell me about a complex technical project you managed. What was the architecture, and what was your role in its delivery?
• How do you ensure you fully understand the scope of a technical project when you aren't the one writing the code?
• Describe a time you worked with a technology manager to automate a manual process.
• Have you ever had to manage a project involving low-latency systems or financial trading platforms? (If not, how would you approach learning the domain?)
• How do you handle situations where technical requirements change rapidly mid-sprint?

Stakeholder Management and Accountability

These questions focus on your leadership, communication style, and ability to navigate conflicts across departments.

• Tell me about a time you had to hold a team member accountable for failing to meet a commitment.
• How do you manage conflicting priorities between two different departments (e.g., Trading vs. Engineering)?
• Describe a time you had to deliver bad news about a project timeline to senior executives. How did you frame it?
• How do you motivate a team that is burnt out or facing a particularly challenging, high-pressure deadline?
• Give an example of how you build trust with highly technical stakeholders who might be skeptical of project managers.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for an interview at AKUNA CAPITAL requires more than just brushing up on standard project management frameworks. You need to demonstrate how your methodologies adapt to a high-stakes, technology-driven trading firm.

Expect your interviewers to evaluate you against the following core criteria:

• Technical Acumen – Your ability to understand the mechanics of software development, IT, or finance. Interviewers will look for your capacity to communicate effectively with technical team members and grasp the nuances of low-latency trading systems.
• Execution and Accountability – How you drive timelines, motivate teams, and ensure deliverables are met. You must show a track record of holding stakeholders accountable without relying solely on formal authority.
• Process Engineering – Your experience in creating and refining processes rather than just following existing ones. We evaluate your ability to identify inefficiencies and implement streamlined, automated workflows using tools like Jira and Agile methodologies.
• Stakeholder Management – Your skill in asking targeted questions to define project scope and your ability to present clear status updates to multiple departments, including senior executives and shareholders.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Project Manager at AKUNA CAPITAL is designed to be rigorous, practical, and highly interactive. You will navigate a series of conversations that progressively test your technical background, your project management toolkit, and your behavioral alignment with our fast-paced culture. Expect the pace of the interviews to mirror the pace of our trading floor—direct, data-driven, and focused on results.

Typically, the process begins with a recruiter screen to align on your background, expectations, and basic qualifications. This is followed by a technical and process-focused interview, often with a technology manager or a senior PM, where you will dive deep into your experience with Agile, Jira, and software development lifecycles. The final stages involve a virtual or in-person onsite loop consisting of cross-functional interviews with stakeholders from Engineering, Trading, and Operations. During these final rounds, expect scenario-based questions that test your ability to manage conflicting priorities and build processes from scratch.

This visual timeline outlines the typical progression of our interview stages, from initial screening through the final cross-functional loop. Use this to pace your preparation, ensuring you are ready to discuss high-level behavioral examples early on, and highly specific, technically nuanced scenarios during the onsite stages. Keep in mind that depending on team availability, some of the final round interviews may be consolidated.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Project Lifecycle and Agile Delivery

At AKUNA CAPITAL, we rely on structured yet adaptable methodologies to deploy complex trading strategies and infrastructure. This evaluation area tests your mastery of the end-to-end project lifecycle and your practical application of Agile development. Interviewers want to see that you can take a project from an ambiguous concept to a clearly defined scope with realistic timelines and resourcing.

Be ready to go over:

• Scope and Goal Definition – How you ask insightful, targeted questions to extract exact deliverables from stakeholders who may be focused purely on the technical details.
• Risk Mitigation – Your proactive strategies for identifying potential roadblocks before they derail a project.
• Tool Mastery – Your deep familiarity with Jira (which is strictly required) and how you use it to enforce project procedures and rules.
• Workflow Streamlining – Techniques for making engineering teams more efficient and removing operational bottlenecks.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Walk me through a time you had to define the scope of a technical project when the initial requirements were highly ambiguous."
• "How do you configure Jira to enforce a new workflow for an engineering team that is resistant to process changes?"
• "Describe a situation where you identified a critical project risk ahead of time. How did you pivot the team to avoid it?"

Technical Fluency and Process Automation

Because you will be working directly with engineers building low-latency technologies and mathematical models, a surface-level understanding of tech is not enough. You must demonstrate the ability to communicate effectively with technical team members and understand the mechanics of how projects are put together. Furthermore, we highly value candidates who can work with technology managers to automate existing processes.

Be ready to go over:

• SDLC Understanding – Your grasp of the Software Development Life Cycle and how it applies to fast-paced, iterative deployments.
• Process Automation – Examples of how you have identified manual, repetitive tasks and collaborated with technical teams to automate them.
• Technical Translation – How you translate complex technical constraints into business impacts for non-technical stakeholders.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to learn a new technical concept quickly to successfully manage a project."
• "Give an example of a manual process you identified and successfully automated. What was the impact on the team's efficiency?"
• "How do you handle a situation where an engineering lead tells you a feature will take four weeks, but the business needs it in two?"

Stakeholder Management and Accountability

A great Project Manager at Akuna does not just coordinate meetings; they drive alignment across Trading, Operations, and Engineering. This area evaluates your communication skills, your ability to manage conflicting priorities, and your comfort level in holding people accountable to their commitments.

Be ready to go over:

• Cross-Functional Alignment – How you establish and maintain relationships across departments with very different goals and working styles.
• Executive Communication – Your framework for communicating and presenting project status to senior executives and shareholders.
• Conflict Resolution – Your approach to managing conflicting priorities and pushing back when necessary, without damaging relationships.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Describe a time you had to hold a senior engineer or stakeholder accountable for a missed deadline. How did you handle the conversation?"
• "How do you balance the competing demands of the Trading team, who wants a feature immediately, and the Engineering team, who needs time to manage technical debt?"
• "Walk me through how you prepare a program status update for a group of senior executives."

Key Responsibilities

As a Project Manager at AKUNA CAPITAL, your day-to-day work is centered around driving execution and creating clarity. You will constantly oversee multiple projects at once, requiring you to context-switch seamlessly between different technical domains and stakeholder groups. A significant portion of your time will be spent coordinating targeted project-level meetings, ensuring that communication between Trading, Operations, and Engineering is active, productive, and documented.

Beyond simply tracking timelines, you will actively dive into the workflows of our technical teams. You will work closely with technology managers to identify bottlenecks and design automated solutions that streamline existing processes. This means you are rarely just maintaining the status quo; you are continuously refining how Akuna delivers its technology. You will be responsible for developing and enforcing Akuna's project procedures, ensuring that best practices are applied uniformly across your portfolio of projects.

You will also serve as the primary communication bridge to leadership. You will regularly synthesize complex project data, risks, and milestones into clear, concise presentations for senior executives and shareholders. This requires a deep understanding of the business value behind the technology, allowing you to highlight what truly matters to the firm's bottom line while shielding your engineering teams from unnecessary distractions.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To thrive as a Project Manager at AKUNA CAPITAL, you need a strong foundation in both project management methodologies and technical concepts. We are looking for candidates who are comfortable in a fast-paced environment and possess a builder's mindset.

• Must-have skills – You must have 4+ years of professional project or program management experience, supported by a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a highly similar field. Deep familiarity with Jira is an absolute requirement, alongside a strong understanding of Agile development methodologies. You must possess outstanding organizational skills, the ability to multitask effectively, and strong written and verbal communication skills to set clear, realistic goals.
• Nice-to-have skills – A background in software development, IT, or finance will significantly set you apart, as it reduces the learning curve when interacting with our technical teams. Experience with other Atlassian tools, specifically Confluence, is highly valued. Finally, a proven track record of creating and refining processes—rather than just following established playbooks—is a major differentiator.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How technical do I need to be for this role? You do not need to write code, but you must be able to understand the mechanics of software development and communicate seamlessly with engineers. Having a degree in CS/IS or a background in IT/software development is highly preferred because it allows you to ask targeted questions and accurately assess project risks without needing constant translation from the engineering team.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate from an average one? Average candidates focus on tracking tasks and scheduling meetings. Successful candidates at AKUNA CAPITAL focus on process optimization and accountability. They demonstrate a history of streamlining workflows, automating redundant tasks, and confidently holding cross-functional teams accountable to their deadlines.

Q: What is the culture like at Akuna Capital? The culture is fast-paced, collaborative, and highly data-driven. Because we operate in the options market-making space, decisions are made quickly and the impact of your work is immediate. We value unique perspectives and empower employees to dive in headfirst to solve complex problems.

Q: How should I prepare for the scenario-based questions? Focus on real-world examples from your past where things did not go according to plan. Interviewers want to hear about the messy realities of project management—how you handled scope creep, technical delays, and difficult stakeholders. Be prepared to explain exactly what you did to resolve the situation, not just what the team did.

Other General Tips

• Speak the Engineer's Language: Whenever possible, frame your past experiences using terminology that resonates with software development teams (e.g., sprints, technical debt, CI/CD pipelines, latency). This builds immediate credibility.
• Showcase Process Creation: AKUNA CAPITAL explicitly looks for candidates who create and refine processes. Don't just talk about how you followed Agile; talk about how you adapted Agile to fit a specific team's unique constraints.
• Quantify Your Impact: When discussing streamlined workflows or automated processes, use numbers. Did you reduce deployment time by 20%? Did you save the engineering team 5 hours a week? Hard data proves your effectiveness.

• Embrace Accountability: Do not shy away from discussing conflict. Be ready to confidently explain how you push back on unrealistic demands and how you hold senior team members to their deadlines.

Summary & Next Steps

Stepping into the Project Manager role at AKUNA CAPITAL is an opportunity to be at the nerve center of a top-tier trading firm. You will be uniquely positioned to influence how cutting-edge technology is built and deployed, directly impacting the firm's ability to provide competitive liquidity in the market. By streamlining workflows and driving accountability, you empower some of the brightest minds in engineering and trading to do their best work.

As you prepare, focus heavily on your ability to bridge technical and business domains. Review your past projects and extract clear, concise examples of how you have mitigated risks, automated processes, and managed difficult stakeholder dynamics. Remember that your mastery of tools like Jira and your foundational understanding of software development lifecycles will be critical focal points throughout the interview process.

The compensation module above reflects the starting base salary expectations for this position in the Chicago market. Keep in mind that this role is also eligible for a discretionary performance bonus, which is a significant component of total compensation in the trading industry, alongside a comprehensive benefits package.

You have the foundational skills and the drive to succeed in this process. Take the time to refine your narrative, practice your scenario-based answers, and approach your interviews with confidence. For further insights and targeted practice, explore additional resources on Dataford. Good luck with your preparation—you are ready to take the next step toward a highly impactful career at AKUNA CAPITAL!