Source

Product Manager

Apply for this job
Organization:
Shinzo
Organization Profile:
Shinzo is building the read layer for blockchains—a trustless, verifiable, permissionless infrastructure for blockchain data access. We're solving one of crypto's dirty secrets: the applications everyone calls "trustless" actually depend on centralized indexers that can fail, manipulate, or gatekeep the data they serve. We believe blockchain data should be a public good—verifiable by anyone, controlled by no one, and accessible without permission. Our mission is to make the entire blockchain data stack as trustless as the blockchains themselves, eliminating the rent-seeking intermediaries that extract value from ecosystems while introducing the very risks decentralization was supposed to solve. We're not writing whitepapers and asking for token purchases based on promises. We're building working technology with a trusted community of developers who care about getting blockchain infrastructure right.
Location:Toronto
Salary:$145,000-$200,000 + equity

The Role

Shinzo is on its way to mainnet. The infrastructure works. Now we need someone to own the decisions that get us there—what ships next, what waits, and what gets cut.

The role is technical, not administrative. You'll be working across indexer clients, ShinzoHub, Outposts, and developer-facing tooling—making hard tradeoffs between ecosystem adoption, infrastructure reliability, and developer experience. That means understanding the data pipeline deeply enough to push back on engineering, kill features that aren't working, and say no to BD asks that would create the wrong kind of technical debt.

You'll report directly to the CEO and own the product surface end-to-end. If you already have opinions about where blockchain data infrastructure is broken—and why the current solutions don't actually solve it—this is the role.

What You'll Do

Roadmap & Prioritization:

  • Own the product roadmap across all Shinzo surfaces—indexer clients, ShinzoHub, Outposts, and developer-facing tooling
  • Make prioritization calls when engineering capacity is constrained—balancing ecosystem adoption, developer experience, and infrastructure reliability
  • Define and maintain a clear picture of what we're building, why, and in what order
  • Kill things that aren't working without waiting for everyone to agree

Developer Experience & Feedback Loops:

  • Own the developer experience—understand how builders integrate Shinzo data, where they get stuck, and what's blocking adoption
  • Build systematic feedback channels with early adopter builders and validator operators
  • Translate real-world usage into specific product decisions, not feature wishlists
  • Work with DevRel to ensure documentation, tooling, and onboarding reflect how the product actually works

Cross-functional Coordination:

  • Keep engineering, BD, and DevRel aligned on what's shipping, when, and why
  • Work with BD on ecosystem-specific requirements—understanding what different chain communities actually need from a trustless indexer
  • Represent product constraints in partnership conversations without being the person who always says no
  • Identify dependencies before they become blockers

Discovery & Strategy:

  • Stay close to the blockchain indexing competitive landscape—not to copy it, but to understand what's being missed
  • Identify unconventional product opportunities that emerge from Shinzo's technical differentiation
  • Make the case for what we should not build as clearly as what we should

What We're Looking For

Required:

  • 4+ years in product management, with at least 2 years in crypto/blockchain infrastructure
  • Deep technical literacy—you can read a codebase, understand data pipeline architectures, and hold your own in a conversation about consensus mechanisms and state models without needing translation
  • Experience shipping developer-facing products—you understand how developers evaluate infrastructure, not just end-user products
  • Clear decision-making instincts—you know how to make a call with incomplete information and own the outcome
  • Enough technical depth to write a spec against Shinzo's actual stack—you know what IPLD is, you understand why Merkle CRDTs matter, and you can write something engineering will build from without 12 rounds of clarification
  • Comfortable working directly with a CEO in a high-ownership, low-bureaucracy environment

Strongly Preferred:

  • Experience with blockchain indexing, data availability, or similar data infrastructure
  • Background in early-stage projects where you built the product function with minimal structure
  • Direct experience working with developer communities—you've shipped something builders actually adopted
  • Familiarity with validator economics and how infrastructure gets adopted at the protocol level
  • Track record of making unpopular product decisions that turned out to be right

Bonus Points:

  • You've shipped a developer tool that depended on The Graph or Alchemy and felt the moment the abstraction broke—and have opinions about why trustless indexing would have prevented it
  • You've been in a postmortem where a centralized data dependency caused an outage and had to explain to the team why "trustless" applications weren't actually trustless
  • You believe blockchain infrastructure should deliver on the ethos—trustless, verifiable, permissionless—or it's not worth building

What Success Looks Like

  • Indexer clients shipping for at least three non-EVM ecosystems, with a roadmap validators and foundations can plan against
  • A developer onboarding experience where builders can go from zero to querying verified data through an Outpost without filing a support ticket
  • BD closing foundation partnerships with a clear product story—not "here's what we're building" but "here's what's live and here's what's next"
  • Engineering spending less time relitigating closed decisions and more time building

Why Shinzo

The Problem Is Real: Blockchain data infrastructure has been broken since the beginning. You'll be shaping the product that fixes it—not building another dashboard on top of a centralized API.

You'll Own It: You'll shape the roadmap, drive the technical direction, and report directly to the CEO. No layers, no committees.

The Team Ships: We're product-led and open-source. You'll be working with engineers who care about correctness, not just velocity. The technical bar is high—that's why your role exists.

The Timing Is Right: Shinzo is early enough that what you build now becomes the foundation. The decisions you make in this role will define how the product scales.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Competitive salary commensurate with experience
  • Remote-first with async-friendly culture
  • Flexible time off

Ready to apply?

Apply for this job