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Institute of Free TechnologyIT

Crypto Operations Lead

The Institute of Free Technology (IFT) is a mission-driven tech startup studio that supports the development of open-source projects focused on safeguarding civil liberties in the digital age. They provide financial, technical, legal, and operational support to a portfolio of projects including Status, Logos, and Waku.

Institute of Free Technology

Employee count: 201-500

AU, CA + 8 more

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About the role:

We are building an institutional-grade on-chain treasury operations function in-house. This is a senior, autonomous hire who takes ownership of the function as it scales - driving the design and implementation of processes, tooling and team, growing into design ownership of the wallet architecture itself over time.

Responsibilities:

  • Own the day-to-day operation, integrity and security of the group's on-chain treasury across multiple legal entities and jurisdictions, operating fluently within a sophisticated multi-Safe + Zodiac (Roles, Delay) wallet architecture. You anticipate failure modes before they materialise and then implement structures and processes to mitigate them.
  • Own the operational response stack end-to-end - monitoring, alerting, runbooks, drills, on-call escalation, post-mortems. Existing work in this area is taken over, rationalised, productionised and extended; net-new is built where required
  • Own incident response - define what constitutes a treasury emergency, the escalation path, and the operational mechanisms that allow the architecture to absorb incidents without heroics. Within six months, the team's escalation path of last resort runs through you, not the CFO. Personally accountable when true incidents occur, including out of hours
  • Help manage the liquidity component of the treasury within a defined risk mandate. Execute positioning across wallets and chains based on forward-looking instructions from FP&A, and engage with counterparties on hedging, on/off-ramping and liquidity execution.
  • Own crypto and fiat payment execution and the wallet signing workflow - operating it as a structured, auditable process with commercial rationale captured at the point of decision
  • Own crypto treasury reporting - position reconciliation, dashboard data quality, and the on-chain transaction record handed to Finance - to a standard that meets the needs of internal users (including FP&A for their forecasting work), community transparency and investor diligence
  • Inherit and grow design ownership of the wallet architecture from the CFO over time, taking the pen on its continued evolution.
  • Own the cold-custody programme and the operational disciplines that keep the recovery path live across the Foundation's multi-year horizon - hardware key custody arrangements, fiduciary succession, periodic wake-up drills.
  • Contribute to investment planning of the liquidity treasury tranche through the Investment Committee
  • Partner closely with the rest of the Finance team and with adjacent Security and Investment functions on shared operational and architectural concerns

Must haves:

  • Crypto-native operator. Deep, first-hand experience operating an institutional-grade crypto treasury under self-custody - built in DeFi protocol operations, in a CeFi crypto institution, in security engineering, or some combination of these. Crypto operations is your discipline, not a layer added to a TradFi treasury background
  • Fluent with Gnosis Safe and Zodiac modules (Roles Modifier, Delay Modifier, Guards) and the operational discipline they require: permission scoping, allowlists, function-selector and parameter scoping, clear-signing, calldata verification. Able to reason about and anticipate failure modes in nested-Safe and module-based architectures
  • Deep self-custody bias and an internalised crypto-OpSec mindset. Comfortable articulating the precise risks and rewards of self-custody vs. centralised custody. Treats exploits and key compromise as one-and-done events that must be anticipated and mitigated - owns the work of fixing the risks they identify, rather than flagging them for someone else to solve
  • Comfortable operating treasury across a multi-entity, multi-jurisdiction structure - you understand how corporate structure and inter-entity boundaries constrain what can be done where, and design processes that respect those constraints
  • Hands-on operator and builder - you design the framework *and* you run it. Writing runbooks, defining alert taxonomies, running drills and executing signings are yours to do. So is designing the framework they live inside
  • Engineering rigour in what you build - documentation, runbooks, deployable infrastructure, tested recovery paths. The standard is that anything you ship can be picked up and operated by someone else without your involvement
  • Strong bias toward automation and leveraging technology - the default response to a manual process is code or tooling, not a checklist. Crypto treasury operations at scale cannot be safely run by hand
  • *Proactive, structured, available. Comfortable with remote / async operations and with on-call expectations in true emergencies. Detail-oriented to the level a mis-typed allowlist destination demands.

Should haves:

  • Track record executing liquidity moves and hedges at scale across both DeFi venues (DEXs, AMMs, lending, yield) and centralised counterparties (market makers, exchanges, OTC desks)
  • Familiarity with the broader monitoring and response stack (Tenderly, Defender, Hypernative, Forta, Hexagate, Den, PagerDuty, or equivalents)
  • Track record of designing and operating structured, auditable workflows in fast-moving environments, and bringing teams along while doing so.

Hiring process:

  1. Introduction call with the Talent team
  2. Interview with the CFO
  3. Compensated Task + Assessment (3-4 hours of work)
  4. Interview with Program Lead
  5. Interview Co-founder

The steps may change along the way if we see it makes sense to adapt the interview stages, so please consider the above as a guideline.

Note: A background check might be required for this role.

About the job

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Posted on

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Hiring timezones

United States +/- 0 hours, and 9 other timezones

About Institute of Free Technology

Learn more about Institute of Free Technology and their company culture.

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We are the Institute of Free Technology (IFT), a mission-driven tech startup studio that emerged from Status, which we, Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, founded in 2017. Our initial goal with Status was to enable the free flow of information and protect the right to private, secure conversations. However, as we delved deeper, we recognized gaps in the existing infrastructure needed to fully realize these values. This realization led to an expansion of our project's scope and ultimately, the formation of IFT and the startups it now incubates. Our core mission is to support the development, adoption, and accessibility of solutions to digital age problems. We are guided by a strong set of principles: liberty, censorship resistance, security, privacy, and inclusivity. We actively seek to connect with and support innovators who are dedicated to defending our digital rights.

At IFT, we provide comprehensive support to take ideas from the drawing board to market. This includes financial backing, technical expertise, legal guidance, people operations, and brand-building assistance at every stage. We empower our startups to concentrate on their core strength: building public goods designed to safeguard civil liberties in the digital age. Our portfolio of open source projects is continually growing and currently includes prominent names like Status, Logos, Codex, Waku, Nimbus, Nomos, and Keycard. As a team, IFT has been completely distributed since its inception. We boast a strong core of over 220 contributors from diverse backgrounds, spread across the globe. We are deeply passionate about open source, and our organizational structure reflects this with minimal hierarchy and no fixed work hours. We champion a high degree of autonomy, encouraging our team members to work independently while aligning with the organization's overarching priorities.

Employee benefits

Learn about the employee benefits and perks provided at Institute of Free Technology.

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Co-working space

Access to co-working spaces is provided.

Unlimited vacation

We offer unlimited vacation to our contributors.

Entirely remote

Our team is completely distributed since inception.

Flexible working hours

Our organizational structure has minimal hierarchy and no fixed work hours.

View Institute of Free Technology's employee benefits
Claim this profileInstitute of Free Technology logoIT

Institute of Free Technology

Company size

201-500 employees

Founded in

2017

Chief executive officer

Jarrad Hope, Carl Bennetts

Employees live in

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