About Time Seventeen
We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events.
The world contains a large class of risks that determine where capital flows yet have no price today. Global supply chains are being reconfigured, while the geopolitical discount rates that inform consequential decisions remain difficult to quantify. Time Seventeen is building tradable synthetic indices and term structures for these risks.
Time Seventeen is infrastructure for geopolitical risk and catastrophe risk. We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events. Our ambition is to turn fragmented judgments about individual events into continuous risk prices, then bring those prices into institutional valuation, trading, and risk-transfer workflows.
Our work connects event definitions, probabilistic forecasting, market data, index methodology, and execution infrastructure. We explore how prediction markets, actuarial models, insurance and reinsurance structures, and blockchain-based DeFi can contribute to a common language for uncertain outcomes. The challenge is to make risk legible across different horizons, exposures, and market participants, while keeping assumptions and limitations explicit.
Building this infrastructure requires more than a compelling forecast. Data must be traceable, events must have defensible resolution rules, methodologies must survive scrutiny, and products must account for liquidity, basis risk, operational resilience, and applicable legal constraints. We want institutions to be able to understand a risk price, challenge its construction, and assess how it relates to the exposure they actually hold.
We are building a focused team across research, engineering, markets, and risk. We value people who can move between deep specialist work and the practical decisions needed to build a company: identifying the important question, testing an approach, communicating the evidence, and carrying the result into a usable system.
About the role
Advise on the legal and regulatory questions involved in building event-risk indices, institutional products, and digital market infrastructure.
You will work where new market infrastructure meets established legal obligations. Index licensing, event-linked contracts, institutional distribution, and on-chain integrations each raise different questions about rights, responsibilities, and market access. Your role is to make those questions actionable before they become delivery blockers.
You will work directly with founders and functional owners to assess proposed activities, negotiate practical agreements, and determine when external expertise is needed. The scope includes data and index rights, commercial contracts, corporate matters, and questions arising from event-linked and digital asset products. Advice should distinguish an identified legal requirement from an unresolved issue or commercial choice.
What you'll do
- Advise the business on commercial, regulatory, product, and corporate matters.
- Draft and negotiate agreements with clients, vendors, and strategic partners.
- Partner with leadership and external counsel to build practical compliance frameworks.
- Track regulatory developments across Hong Kong and other relevant markets.
- Build clear legal pathways for proposed products, including contractual allocation of risk, data rights, distribution restrictions, and escalation to specialist counsel.
- Maintain contract templates and a record of material legal decisions, manage external counsel, and advise on confidentiality, intellectual property, and data-protection provisions.
What we're looking for
- Qualified lawyer with experience in financial services, fintech, or digital assets.
- Strong commercial judgment and the ability to turn complex rules into clear advice.
- Comfort working independently in a fast-moving, high-ownership environment.
- Excellent written and spoken English; Chinese language skills are an advantage.
- Experience drafting and negotiating commercial or financial-services agreements and identifying issues that require jurisdiction-specific advice.
- Ability to prioritize matters, protect privileged and confidential information, and explain legal constraints in practical terms to product and engineering teams.
What success looks like
- Provide clear legal assessments of prioritized products and activities, with unresolved questions and approval dependencies identified.
- Deliver negotiated agreements with usable terms for data rights, liability, confidentiality, and operational responsibilities.
- Establish proportionate contract and legal-review processes with reliable tracking of obligations and external advice.
Location & working arrangement
This role is based in Hong Kong. Please include your location, availability, and any working-arrangement requirements in your application.
How to apply
Share your CV and describe a product assessment, negotiation, or legal process you helped deliver. Explain your personal contribution, important decisions, and results. A relevant work sample is welcome where you have permission to share it; please exclude confidential employer or client information. Include your availability and why Time Seventeen's work interests you.
How we work
Time Seventeen is a focused, high-ownership team. We value clear thinking, direct communication, careful execution, and people who carry important work through to a result. We expect colleagues to surface inconvenient evidence, ask precise questions, and make the limits of their work explicit. Strong specialist judgment matters, as does the willingness to understand how your work affects research, markets, engineering, and risk. We prefer useful documentation and clear decisions to unnecessary process.