CEO/Lead Contributor

 (No experience required)
$75k – $150k • 1.5% – 5.0%
Published: 1 week ago
Avatar for Sherlock

Sherlock

Combining audit contests + smart contract coverage to offer protocols ultimate protection

Job Location

Job Type

Full Time

Visa Sponsorship

Not Available

Remote Work Policy

Remote only

Hires remotely

Everywhere

Preferred Timezones

Pacific Time, Mountain Time, Central Time, Eastern Time, Atlantic Time, Greenland, Brasilia Summer Time, Azores, Coordinated Universal Time, Central European Time, Eastern European Time, Turkey Time

Relocation

Allowed

Skills

Start-Up CEO

Hiring contact

Jack Sanford

The Role

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

This role essentially involves guiding Sherlock to success and accomplishing Sherlock's mission of making DeFi safe for everyone.

The rules for accomplishing that are not set in stone.

To be successful in this role, you likely need to have very strong Web3 experience and experience leading a startup/small team. You probably also need to be in a place in life where you can fully dedicate yourself to this role.

You understand the value of crypto in the world and are excited to bring it to mass adoption. You understand that security at the smart contract/application/blockchain level is a huge part of getting to mass adoption. And you understand that the path Sherlock has taken puts it in a unique position to become successful in the future and help crypto get to mass adoption.

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 makes you qualified for this role? How far would you go to make Sherlock successful? Why should Sherlock hire you over hundreds of other applicants?

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

  • Setting the strategic direction for Sherlock (with the buy-in of relevant stakeholders)
  • Making personnel decisions at Sherlock
  • Dealing with the worst problems that Sherlock is facing at any given time
  • Anything else that comes up that no one else in the company is better-suited to deal with

Requirements

  • Strong knowledge of crypto/DeFi/Web3 security
  • Experience in a similar role at a startup or protocol
  • A credible plan for Sherlock's future

Nice to Haves

  • Solidity expertise
  • Finance expertise
  • Startup expertise

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
  • Ability to move quickly and get stuff done with 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

More about Sherlock

Founders

Evert Kors
Co-founder • 3 years • 3 years
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Jack Sanford
Co-founder • 3 years
Amsterdam
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