Crypto Operations Lead in London

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Anticipate failure modes before they materialise and 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 forecasting), 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.

Must haves

• 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.

Should haves

• Track record executing liquidity moves and hedges at scale across both DeFi venues (DEXs, AMMs, lending, yield) and centralised 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.