Lead Visual & Brand Designer

About Sherlock

Sherlock believes that a sound currency and functioning financial system should be basic human rights. Sherlock’s mission is to help create an open, uncensorable financial system that is secure enough for billions of people to trust with their life savings.

Smart contract auditing is a good start, but it’s not enough. That's why Sherlock provides protocols with state-of-the-art, incentive-aligned audit contests as well as smart contract exploit coverage and bug bounty coverage.

Sherlock is the only audit provider to offer a "best of both worlds" solution to auditing, as well as back audits with smart contract exploit coverage.

The best of both worlds approach combines traditional auditing (reserving 1-2 highly talented security experts) with an audit contest approach that gets hundreds of eyes on a codebase and surfaces things that teams of 2-4 can just never find.

And Sherlock is the only auditor to offer smart contract exploit coverage behind each audit. If activated, it means Sherlock can pay out USDC if the contracts Sherlock audited get hacked. Sherlock also offers bug bounty coverage for whitehats who find bugs in the later on. No other security player has more incentive alignment with protocol teams and users than Sherlock.

Sherlock has done more smart contract audits than nearly anyone else since launching audit contests in September 2022. Repeat customers include Optimism, GMX, Ajna, Gitcoin, Index Coop, Opyn, Notional, OlympusDAO, Lyra, Perennial and many more.

Join Sherlock's elite team at the ground floor, backed by some of the leading Silicon Valley and crypto venture capitalists including IDEO, Archetype, Dragonfly Ventures, Spartan, A Capital, Scalar Capital, DeFi Alliance, GSR, CoinFund, LedgerPrime, and Synthetix founder Kain Warwick.

Sherlock's Culture

Sherlock's culture is fast-moving, intense, and not right for everyone. To excel on this team, you must:

• Be mission-focused. Anyone who is in this for reasons other than creating the best worldwide financial system in history will either get too demotivated to last through multi-year bear markets or get too distracted during the frothy bull markets.
• Be willing to work long, hard and smart. If Sherlock has any advantage, it is the willingness to work harder and think with more discipline than anyone else. This includes thinking from first principles about all important decisions and always thinking in tradeoffs and bets.
• Be an owner. You will get ownership in Sherlock after a short time in this role, so you will be expected to act like you are the owner of a Michelin-star restaurant where no effort or detail to improve the customer's experience is too small for you.
• Be a builder. Everyone at Sherlock is deep in the arena and we are reminded of that every day by the people who sit in the stands (on Twitter or elsewhere) and criticize. There are no "idea people" or managers at Sherlock; everyone is in execution mode first and foremost and gets their hands dirty.
• Be a customer at all times. The customer is always right and if the customer makes a mistake, it is Sherlock's fault for not making the rules, UI or UX, etc. clear enough. It is too easy to sit behind a computer and build in an echo chamber, so we must experience the customer's viewpoint as often as possible.
• Be a professional athlete. Professional athletes opt in to a high-performance, meritocratic culture. This creates an environment that brings out the best in people and rewards each for their respective performance. But it's also an environment where being in the 70th percentile in your role means you will have a short tenure on the team.
• You thrive in a direct, transparent environment. You must be comfortable giving direct feedback to others and receiving direct feedback yourself. "Not ruffling feathers" comes at the expense of moving in a suboptimal direction for too long. Sherlock is extremely transparent internally (and with customers) which means you can get involved in decisions made in any part of Sherlock.

The Role

Sherlock is lucky to be in a place where its auditing services are likely the best in the entire crypto industry. Sherlock regularly finds vulnerabilities that top teams miss and is almost never found in a situation where the reverse happens. And Sherlock is the only auditor willing to repay millions of dollars in the case of a missed exploit. The Sherlock team is working every day to improve the product and make this gap even wider. See this link for a breakdown of why Sherlock audits are superior: https://docs.sherlock.xyz/audits/protocols

However, Sherlock is not yet well-known to the broader crypto industry. Sherlock needs a recognizable personality and style that will build a lasting impression in people's minds over time.

For the past 12 months, Sherlock has done more audits than nearly any other auditor (~100). But the vast majority of these audits have come to Sherlock from word of mouth and repeat customers. This is great, but there's an entire side to the business that's missing: coherent design and marketing. This is where you'll come in. When you land on Sherlock's website, it should be a memorable experience and drive customers toward working with Sherlock. When you see a tweet from Sherlock, it should stand out. Sherlock is not afraid to be bold, and is looking for people who are not either. If you're serious about applying for this job and you've read this far, please email jack at sherlock dot xyz with 4-sentence answers to these three questions: What are the 3 most important principles of design that you hold dear? What is one product you love and what specifically makes the design great? Why should Sherlock select you over hundreds of other applicants?

Your role is:

Take Sherlock's mission, principles, and aspirational customer experience and communicate it visually in everything Sherlock does.

Of course, in practice this job involves a lot of skills.

You'll need to have state-of-the-art design skills. Crypto is bold and cutting-edge. Sherlock is bold and cutting-edge. And you need to be bold and cutting-edge with your design. That means knowing the history of design styles in crypto and software in the last 5 years. And pushing those frontiers.

You need to be crypto-native. You'll be expected to contribute on Day 1 in this role. There is no time to explain all the differences between the crypto world and whatever design world you came from. There are many differences -- some due to crypto's personality, others due to functional constraints.

You need to be product-focused. Sherlock believes the only path to consistently good design is a deep understanding of Sherlock's product and how it fits into the market. Sherlock believes a surface-level understanding of Sherlock's product will result in design outcomes that are inconsistent at best. If there is not a deep understanding of the product, then there is nothing to translate into design.

With that in mind, the day-to-day responsibilities of this role likely include:

• Creating the definitive guide to Sherlock's design (10x) weight
• Creating visuals (image/video) for Twitter and other social media channels (5x weight)
• Creating a pixel-perfect mockup of Sherlock's website and app pages (5x weight)
• Developing (building) Sherlock's website (3x weight)
• Designing miscellaneous assets for events, special promotions, etc. (3x weight)
• Being open to helping Sherlock in any area on any given day (wearing any hat as best you can)(2x weight)

Requirements

• Must have state-of-the-art design skills and evidence of pushing the frontier of design in some area
• Must be crypto-native and understand the mentality of the "degen"
• Must have a strong belief in the future potential of crypto
• Must understand and share the cultural values of Sherlock listed in "Sherlock's Culture" above

Nice to Haves

• Being able to actually build Sherlock's website in addition to designing it
• General programming knowledge
• Technical understanding of DeFi protocols under the hood
• Crypto smart contract security experience

What's in it for you

• You'll likely be the only designer at Sherlock for 6-12 months, so everything public-facing will be created by you
• Designs will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people (Sherlock's Twitter impressions were 2.4M last month)
• Attractive base (payable in fiat or crypto) + tokens/equity
• Flexible time-off policy
• Fully remote and flexible workstyle gives you the autonomy to live and work how you want
• Optional access to shared working space at your local WeWork or equivalent
• Great healthcare including dental (where relevant)
• Multiple offsites each year in places like France, Colombia, Portugal, etc.
• Root access to the decision-making process/criteria in all areas of Sherlock and the ability to work directly with the founders
• Ability to move quickly and get stuff done on a small, elite team that is already making a big impact in the crypto space
• Play a huge role in defining the future of Sherlock and accomplishing the goal of making crypto/DeFi accessible to everyone