Crypto Operations Lead

## 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.

- 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.

- **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.

Institute of Free Technology (IFT) is a mission-driven tech startup studio that incubates and supports projects building digital public goods and privacy-preserving infrastructure. It provides financial, technical, legal, people operations, and brand-building support to help startups focused on civil liberties, censorship resistance, security, and the free flow of information.