Institute of Free Technology · 3 weeks ago
Crypto Operations Lead
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/StaffInstitute of Free Technology is building an institutional-grade on-chain treasury operations function in-house. The Crypto Operations Lead will take ownership of the treasury operations, driving the design and implementation of processes, tooling, and team as it scales.
Computer Software
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
Qualification
Required
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
Preferred
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
Company
Institute of Free Technology
As a mission-driven tech startup studio, Institute of Free Technology provides Technical, Financial, Legal, People Operations, Branding & awareness services to a wide portfolio of open source projects such as: Logos: https://logos.co Status: https://status.app/ Nimbus: https://nimbus.team/ Keycard: https://keycard.tech/ We take ideas from the drawing board to market; our startups are free to focus on what they do best — building public goods to safeguard civil liberties in the digital age.
Founded in 2024
51-200 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageCompany data provided by crunchbase