Operations Lead

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 a fast-moving, early-stage crypto protocol. Everyone on the team wears many hats and roles change often.

The Head of Operations will wear the most hats of anyone on the team. You are the MacGyver, the Swiss Army Knife, the person who "gets shit done" and moves things forward.

Here's some attributes that might describe a candidate for this role:

You are hungry, driven and a rigorous thinker.

For whatever reason, you have a chip on your shoulder and something to prove to the world.

You realize that open-mindedness and an optimistic attitude towards changing the world are pre-requisites for accomplishing big things.

You're the most competent person you know. When no one else knows how to solve a problem, you're the one who steps up, throws yourself at it, and figures it out.

You see criticism as an opportunity to improve yourself or your mental model of the world. You also realize that negativity and criticism towards others are much easier to generate than solutions and ideas, so the focus should always be on the latter. In the same vein, you know that building and action are harder than analyzing and inaction so you prefer to get your hands dirty at the first moment it makes sense.

You think the best way to be effective at your role is to make sure you have a solid understanding of all the other aspects of the business.

It's obvious to you that yelling, emotional reactions and group identities (political, etc.) likely never contribute to accomplishing the mission.

You default to transparency and openness but have the emotional intelligence to know how to manage others' feelings while still getting the relevant information across.

The world is in a constant battle with complexity and entropy, so you simplify, simplify, simplify, organize and automate. The world is always working to bring the product or idea closer to being average and mediocre. You know you must aim for the highest standards and chase perfection in order to have any chance at avoiding mediocrity and regression to the mean.

You always push yourself to think bigger while realizing that the difference is often made in the smallest of details.

You know that 99.9% of time you'll be used to seeing things from the inside, but how the customer experiences something from the outside shouldn't be forgotten.

You know that your knowledge base at any given time is woefully incomplete and, especially in crypto, continuously learning and pushing your comfort zone is the only way to evolve and innovate. In the same vein, you know that your design/solution is always wrong, and you must continuously work to make it less wrong. But you also don't get stuck in the trap of optimizing a solution that should not exist in the first place, so you continously question the "requirements" of the problem you are trying to solve. If you're serious about applying for this job and you read this far, please email jack at sherlock dot xyz with 4-sentence answers to these three questions: What do you want out of life? Why are you interested in crypto? Why should we hire you over hundreds of other applicants?

If you're not technical, the first question is "Why not?" The second question is "Do you feel comfortable leading in an environment where the core product is highly technical and therefore you may never fully understand all of the tradeoffs involved in a decision?" Sherlock's core product and business is highly technical and can be difficult to understand if you don't have that background.

Sherlock also emphasizes technical backgrounds because it keeps you grounded to reality. You receive instant, unforgiving feedback as a programmer and develop humility. This feedback is impossible to get in many other disciplines. It also teaches you to boil things down to their fundamental pieces (reasoning from first principles aka debugging) and reason up from there. And you are forced to learn persistance. You may have to debug something in 50 different places before you find the root cause.

If you saw a lot of yourself in the description above, then you should consider applying to the Head of Operations role at Sherlock. Some day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Working with protocol customers to move through various audit processes and get coverage activated for protocols on-chain
• Solving edge cases for protocols who don't cleanly fit into Sherlock's audit contest process or smart contract exploit coverage model
• Handling manual tasks like protocol team invoicing, security expert payouts, updating on-chain coverage amounts, and working to automate these tasks over time
• Generally smoothing out the edges when an audit report has a bug or mistake that should be corrected, or a protocol team's Discord chat didn't get set up correctly, etc.
• Being the first line of defense for issues that get posted on the Discord and fixing the issue or knowing who to delegate it to
• Thinking critically and strategically about the future of Sherlock and how to improve the customer experience for protocol teams, security experts, and stakers all the time
• Some amount of coding skills are required and familiarity with GitHub is a must (or at least willingness to learn)
• Some amount of familiarity with spreadsheets (Google Sheets, Excel) is also required
• Some amount of familiarity with crypto (how basic DeFi protocols like Uniswap work, what kinds of smart contract vulnerabilities exist) is probably necessary

Requirements

• Must be the most competent person you know
• Must be a hungry go-getter
• Some knowledge of programming, GitHub and Excel/Sheets
• Willingness to work long hours with little outside direction
• Strong belief in the future potential of crypto
• Must understand and share the values listed in the "Sherlock Culture" section above

Nice to Haves

• Experience with Solidity/Python
• Experience with smart contract security

What's in it for you

• Attractive base (payable in fiat or crypto) + tokens/equity. While the base salary will be competitive, Sherlock prides itself on above-market token compensation, giving you a large stake in Sherlock’s long-term success.
• 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