About the Role
We are looking for an individual who has developed system design discipline within a big-tech engineering environment and has honed skills in structured problem-solving and stakeholder management in a consulting setting. This role requires not only the application of those skills to physical commodity trading but also a hands-on approach to producing and refining design artifacts that directly inform a development team. As a member of the technology delivery team, you will ensure that the systems built accurately reflect the mechanics of the commodity trade lifecycle.
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What This Role Is Not
- This is not an economist or market analyst role; it does not involve market fundamentals, price forecasting, or trading research.
- This is not a strategy or corporate development role; it does not include market entry assessments or business cases for investment.
- This is not a pure project management role; however, you will be responsible for sequencing efforts within your workstreams.
The position focuses heavily on systems design as part of a business architecture team, producing materials directly utilized by product owners, architects, and engineers.
What You Will Do
Design the Business Architecture of the Platform
- Model business processes across Trading, Finance, Logistics, and Risk as structured, decomposable process definitions.
- Define the business entity model and data dictionary, including entities, attributes, relationships, identifiers, cardinality, and lifecycle ownership.
- Specify state models for core objects in the commodity trade lifecycle, including valid transitions and events that trigger them.
- Maintain a business rules catalog that includes conditions, decision tables, tolerances, thresholds, and their owners—distinct from process flow.
Turn Design into Buildable Specification
- Write functional specifications and acceptance criteria that enable engineers to implement without needing to reinterpret business intent.
- Translate operational workflows into system logic—covering validations, calculations, allocations, postings, and automated decisions.
- Specify integration contracts and data flows among the trading platform, finance systems, and external services.
- Collaborate with architects and engineers through build and test phases, validating that the delivered behavior aligns with the original designs.
Own the Decision Record
- Drive design decisions to closure: frame options, present trade-offs and risks, secure decisions, and document them.
- Maintain a decision log along with a register of open items, assumptions, and change requests.
- Prioritize across releases, sequencing scope based on business value and technical dependencies.
Work with Stakeholders
- Elicit requirements directly from business stakeholders, reconciling their statements with industry best practices.
- Present designs and recommendations to senior stakeholders, including trading and operations leadership.
- Incorporate change management into the solution, establishing role definitions, controls, adoption safeguards, and migration plans away from spreadsheet-based practices.
Applied AI
- Design AI-enabled and automated steps within commercial workflows, such as document extraction and validation, while defining clear boundaries for mandatory human decision-making.
What We Expect
- Experience in a large tech organization (product, platform, or engineering environment) with formal system design practice exposure.
- Experience in top-tier management consultancy or a similar professional services environment.
- Familiarity with physical commodity trading, energy markets, or CTRM systems.
- Fluency in both English and Russian is mandatory.
- Deep knowledge of the physical deal lifecycle, including trade finance and accounting interfaces (prepayments, invoicing, accruals, letters of credit, treasury, and statutory reporting boundaries).
- Understanding of oil logistics in commodity trading.
- Demonstrable ability to produce structured design artifacts, such as process models, entity-relationship and data models, state diagrams, and decision tables.
- Comfort with an engineering delivery cadence, including backlog management, acceptance, and release processes.
- Attention to terminology and versioned documentation.
- Strong commercial and financial analytical skills related to system design queries.
- Location: Dubai or remote with regular travel to Dubai for collaboration with the trading and operations team.
Nice to Have
- Experience with crude, refined products, or LNG flows.
- Knowledge of risk management functions related to exposure, credit limits, position management, and VaR.
- Familiarity with pricing and reference data, including Platts, Argus, ICE, and forward curves.
- Exposure to event-driven or microservices architecture; familiarity with event sourcing.
- Experience leading CTRM platform implementation, as a Business Analyst or power user.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs and automation tools in a commercial context.
- Exposure to chartering or shipping S&P.
Why This Role
- Direct influence over the architecture and roadmap of a trading platform being developed from the ground up.
- Opportunity to work at the intersection of deep physical trading knowledge and modern platform engineering.
- High ownership: you define the design, defend it, and see it through to completion.
