Crypto Operations Lead

About Us

Institute of Free Technology is a mission-driven tech startup studio. We take ideas from the drawing board to market with financial, technical, legal, people operations, and brand-building support at every step.

Our startups are free to focus on what they do best — building public goods to safeguard civil liberties in the digital age.

About the role

We are building an institutional-grade on-chain treasury operations function in-house. This is a senior autonomous position overseeing treasury operations as the function scales, with growing design ownership of wallet architecture.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day operation, integrity and security of the group’s on-chain treasury across multiple legal entities and jurisdictions, operating within a sophisticated multi-Safe + Zodiac wallet architecture. Anticipate failure modes and implement mitigation structures and processes.
• Own the operational response stack end-to-end including monitoring, alerting, runbooks, drills, on-call escalation, and post-mortems. Rationalize existing work and build net-new as required.
• Own incident response by defining treasury emergencies, escalation paths, and operational mechanisms. Within six months, the team’s escalation path runs through you, not the CFO. Personally accountable for true incidents, 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 FP&A instructions and engage with counterparties on hedging, on/off-ramping and liquidity execution.
• Own crypto and fiat payment execution and the wallet signing workflow as a structured, auditable process with commercial rationale captured at decision point.
• Own crypto treasury reporting including position reconciliation, dashboard data quality, and the on-chain transaction record handed to Finance, meeting internal user needs, community transparency and investor diligence standards.
• 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, including hardware key custody arrangements, fiduciary succession, and 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 with 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. Crypto operations must be your discipline, not a layer added to TradFi treasury background.
• Fluent with Gnosis Safe and Zodiac modules (Roles Modifier, Delay Modifier, Guards) and their operational discipline: 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 internalized crypto-OpSec mindset. Comfortable articulating the precise risks and rewards of self-custody vs. centralized custody. Treat exploits and key compromise as one-and-done events that must be anticipated and mitigated, owning the work of fixing identified risks rather than flagging them for others.
• Comfortable operating treasury across a multi-entity, multi-jurisdiction structure. Understand how corporate structure and inter-entity boundaries constrain operations and design processes respecting those constraints.
• Hands-on operator and builder who designs the framework and runs it. Writing runbooks, defining alert taxonomies, running drills and executing signings are your responsibility. So is designing the framework they live inside.
• Engineering rigor in what you build including documentation, runbooks, deployable infrastructure, and tested recovery paths. Anything shipped must be operable 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, and available. Comfortable with remote/async operations and 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 centralized 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 adaptation makes sense, so please consider the above as a guideline.

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