Data Acquisition Specialist

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
Build Time Seventeen’s external data foundation by identifying, evaluating, and securing sources for geopolitical risk, catastrophe risk, and institutional market research. You will map the data landscape behind our risk infrastructure and turn specific research needs into a sourcing strategy. Potential sources include event histories, supply-chain exposures, catastrophe observations, insurance data, and market signals. Your task is to determine which sources offer useful coverage and incremental information, then make them accessible under appropriate usage rights. This role combines external relationship building with analytical diligence. You will work with researchers, engineers, and legal colleagues to evaluate samples, understand collection methods, compare alternatives, and negotiate commercial terms. A dataset is valuable when it can improve a defined workflow and be used reliably, not simply because it is large or difficult to obtain.

What you'll do
• Translate research and product priorities into a ranked data-acquisition plan with explicit use cases and evaluation criteria.
• Identify specialist providers and potential proprietary sources across geopolitical events, catastrophe hazards, exposures, and financial markets.
• Conduct outreach, build vendor relationships, and coordinate sample access and technical evaluation.
• Assess coverage, timeliness, provenance, historical availability, revisions, methodological bias, and overlap with existing sources.
• Work with researchers to test incremental value and with engineers to estimate integration and maintenance requirements.
• Negotiate pricing, trials, delivery terms, and proposed rights for internal use, derived data, index construction, and redistribution, supported by legal review.
• Maintain a clear record of vendor conversations, evaluation findings, commercial terms, and reasons for pursuing or declining opportunities.
• Coordinate onboarding and monitor whether acquired data continues to meet the agreed quality and commercial requirements. What we're looking for
• Experience in data acquisition, alternative-data research, partnerships, business development, or a comparable sourcing role.
• Understanding of how dataset provenance, coverage, collection methods, and usage rights affect practical value.
• Confidence conducting external outreach and managing negotiations with commercial counterparts.
• Strong organization and ability to coordinate multiple evaluations without losing important details.
• Ability to compare costs, integration effort, and likely research or product value.
• Experience with data licensing, quantitative analysis, insurance data, or financial-market data is particularly useful.
• Sound judgment around privacy, confidentiality, and permitted use of third-party information. What success looks like
• Build a prioritized source landscape linked to specific index and modeling needs.
• Produce defensible acquisition recommendations with documented sample evaluations and usage-rights requirements.
• Secure and onboard suitable datasets with clear ownership of quality, delivery, and licensing obligations. Location & working arrangement This role is based in Hong Kong. Please share your availability, current location, and any academic or scheduling requirements.

How to apply
Share your background and a concrete example of building, leading, or delivering relevant work. Describe your ownership, the key decisions, and the results. Founder candidates should also explain which part of Time Seventeen they want to build and why. 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. Apply for this role→