About Open Web Collective:

Open Web Collective (OWC) is an early-stage blockchain venture fund and accelerator. By bringing together capital and value-add services, OWC helps founders de-risk, accelerate, and advance Web 3.0.

During our three-month long accelerator program, our promising pre-seed and seed stage startups work with leading investors and corporate partners to validate and invalidate business ideas, build products, define and grow KPIs, develop product-market fit, and fundraise.

OWC also makes direct investments at the seed stage outside of our accelerator program.

Description:

The Blockchain Engineer, VP will lead high-level security/architecture reviews of crypto projects. You will partner closely with the founders of our portfolio companies as well as OWC Portfolio Service, Research, and Investment teams to make recommendations on product and startup technology ideas, code, and architecture. In addition, you should be able to evaluate the technical gaps in the market, and recommend opportunities of focus for our team.

You have experimented with, tested, or built a variety of blockchain projects and are a “Web3 native” recognizing code from different protocols and understanding what will influence the crypto economy. You keep up to date with the latest smart contract innovations and think creatively of applications while keeping in mind potential vulnerabilities and how to mitigate them. You are a perfectionist, striving to make code both more efficient and safer.

Beyond this baseline, you must show versatility: an intimate knowledge of the whole web stack; how all the pieces of advanced technological architectures fit together; front-end frameworks database, network layer, HTTP protocol, TCP/IP and Linux, and how they impact the performance of robust distributed applications.

This is a part-time role on a contract or project basis.



Responsibilities:

Blockchain Security:

  • Perform security assessments, framework development, and threat modeling of assets, including various blockchain protocols, smart contracts, and other distributed ledger tech
  • Partner with software engineering teams to advise on code and architecture for internal and external smart contract development
  • Partner with external tooling teams to drive OWC Blockchain Security Tool suite
  • Investigate impactful changes to the space, asset upgrades, and novel innovations, such as zero-knowledge proofs and bleeding-edge blockchain protocols

BuidL:

  • Help grow innovative, ground-breaking product that address real demand
  • Take end-to-end ownership over what you build and focus on qualities, such as testing, security, stability, scalability, and operability
  • Design an overall architecture and integrate blockchain solutions into existing infrastructure
  • Translate features into development stories in collaboration with product management, drive their delivery, and execute the backlog
  • Foster good agile practices that provide a foundation for iterative product development and build valid solutions to live problems

Partner with Investment Team:

  • Identifying and researching opportunity areas to drive our investment thesis
  • Work with cross-functional teams to align on risk scorings and mitigations for companies and assets

Ecosystem Engagement:

  • Publish blogs and give talks (internal and external) on newfound vulnerabilities, incident investigations, unique integration risks, and related topics
  • Formulate a set of best practices and testing suites for portfolio companies and community
  • Leverage your technical expertise to establish relationships with the top entrepreneurs and builders in the space

Qualifications:

  • 5+ years of relevant software development experience building high-performance, mission critical applications
  • You are passionate about blockchain technology, crypto-economic protocol design, game theory, and decentralized finance.
  • You have a basic understanding of some common cryptographic vulnerabilities, protocols, and understanding of cybersecurity.
  • You participate and believe in the open-source movement.
  • Ability to write well-tested, production-grade code in your language of choice.
  • Experience with programming languages (like Solidity, Python, C, Rust, Go, etc.) popular for systems programming.
  • Ability to own projects end-to-end, including architecture, development, devops/monitoring, and project management. (We’re happy to provide product/architecture input and help be a sounding board.)
  • You possess great written and spoken communication skills. We get regular face-time with builders and founders.

Nice-to-haves:

  • You have a professional understanding of Solidity or Rust development and deployment of smart contracts. You may have built your own blockchain projects in the past.
  • You are a leader with a technical background that produces research and put it to work in our portfolio.
  • You care deeply about building high-quality, well-tested code.

Preferred qualifications:

  • Remote workplace (US-based preferred, US Eastern or Pacific Time working hours)